One Big Question. Three Ways of Knowing
Era’s Inaugural Panel on Diverse Perspectives Shaping Modern Education
If humans are made to learn, why do so many in our society struggle to achieve basic literacy and numeracy? That was the question posed to a packed crowd of students and faculty at Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Center auditorium in Era’s inaugural panel, A Priest, a Scientist, and a Humanist Walk Into a Classroom.
The conversation quickly surfaced a paradox: education is one of the most powerful infrastructures we have for social change, yet it also carries a long history of alienation and inequity.
“Education presents us with a real tension,” said Nicole McNeil, Sweeney Family Director of the Center for Educational Research and Action (Era). “It gives us extraordinary capacity to expand opportunity for all children, and yet it also often perpetuates exclusion. Humans are made to learn, but they’re not made to learn alone. That means we have to look beyond individual outcomes to the relationships we’re building around learners.”
These tensions cannot be resolved within the confines of a single discipline. That is why discussions across different ways of knowing are central to Era’s work. Bringing together panelists from different disciplines provided an opportunity for the dialogue necessary for deeper understanding. If there was a point of convergence that emerged during the event, it was this: human relationships are essential to learning. The challenge before us is to design systems that strengthen, rather than diminish, those relationships.
Fostering relationships is also central to Era’s mission. Era seeks to connect researchers and educators across disciplines and professions to advance knowledge of how people learn and improve learning environments. This work is accomplished through research training, collaborative projects, and public conversations that bring different perspectives into meaningful dialogue. Several of the center’s research trainees played visible roles in the event. Hannah Petersen, a graduate student in Sociology and part of Notre Dame’s Program for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (ND PIER), posed a follow-up question to the panel that extended discussion toward possible solutions. “What struck me as someone who studies the modern educational landscape,” she said, “was how differently each panelist described the problem; however, panelists agreed that human relationships are at the foundation of both the challenge and the solution.”
At the Institute for Educational Initiatives (IEI), research is viewed as more than a means to improve educational outcomes. It is also a way to deepen our understanding of what it means to be human. “One of the strengths of the Catholic intellectual tradition is its commitment to engaging complex questions from multiple perspectives,” said Matt Kloser, Hackett Family Director of the IEI. “Events like this reflect IEI’s commitment to bringing together perspectives across disciplines in pursuit of understanding how we can better serve students and teachers. Through the virtuous cycle of research, formation, and service, we aim to cultivate both the intellect and the heart in pursuit of human flourishing and the common good.”
Click below to watch the full panel discussion:
