When I first travelled to Japan, it was in August - and I knew it was going to be incredibly warm. We’d done our research, and noted many Tokyoites carried hand-held fans, to cool down in the busy city. I went online and found variations of these fans, all very pretty and elegant - but then I found one better! A battery operated fan, that allowed you to release water from a chamber that created a cooling mist at the same time.
Ha! Why waste more energy fanning yourself, when this would do it for you and cool you down even further with the added water chamber.
We smugly packed our fans, and headed to the land of the Rising Sun.
On arrival it was incredibly warm - as anticipated - so we retrieved our fans, filled it up with water, popped the batteries in and set off.
Two minutes in to our walk we were already very warm - time to set the fans in action! We switched on - it took some time to get going. Unlike when tested in the cooler UK climes, it didn’t seem to be delivering the breeze we had expected. Maybe a squirt of cooling mist? That seemed to just deliver a warm haze which evaporated quickly in the heat, as the fan slowly whirred round moving warm humid air around us.
As I looked around, Japanese people were going aboout their business, with hand-held fans - not one of them had a battery operated one. My smugness quickly faded to sheepishness and we bought some very nice traditional ones at the next opportunity - and the relief of a much better, cooler breeze from these fans was immediate.
I’d expanded my knowledge through experience, and also learned that sometimes, there’s a reason for things - and my lack of knowledge - but assumption that tradition wasn’t as good as ‘progress’ - had been a bump back to Earth. I’d definitely broadened the hinterland of my understanding.
Another example - a friend was watching a heron try to catch a fish - it was standing in the fastest flowing area of the waterfall, and kept slipping on some rocks every now and again. “It won’t catch anything in that ridiculous position’ she scoffed. Moments later, it caught a fish - then another, and another. Soon other heron were clamouring to be in the same place.
Just because we think we know what’s best - or we have a more ‘developed’ or ‘progressive’ notion of something, doesn’t mean we have the full picture. In my naivety, I’d forgotten that the fans we’d bought wouldn’t work with the heat in Japan. Until I experienced it.
My friend assumed the heron was stupid - forgetting that this is its main job, day in day out. It knew exactly what it was doing. It didn’t care that it had an audience - it was focused on its task. She’d also broadened the hinterland of her understanding.
So what’s hinterland?
“Cognitive psychology has long established that we only have a tiny window of attention through which to attend to new material, but armed with multiple sub-surface associations, from prior knowledge, we rapidly assimilate and interpret the new. A narrative is just an intensification of this process.” Christine Counsell
Hinterland is the sub-surface associations - built up through experiences, stories we have to tell and situations encountered. It’s the fertile ground that learning takes place on. When teaching, you can distill down to clear, concise information - the core - but ensuring that it sticks, and the learner understands involves bringing in much broader information. That is learned from seeing the bigger picture.
As Christine goes on to explain
“The core is like a residue – the things that stay, the things that can be captured as proposition. Often, such things need to be committed to memory. But if, in certain subjects, for the purposes of teaching, we reduce it to those propositions, we may make it harder to teach, and at worst, we kill it. A good example is reading a work of literature in English. We can summarise plot, characters and stylistic features in a revision or teachers’ guide, and those summaries may well represent the residue that we want secure in pupils’ long-term memories…
The act of reading the full novel is like the hinterland. However much pupils might be advised to study or create distillations, commentaries and plot summaries, however much these become decent proxies for (and aids towards) the sort of thing that stays in our heads after we’ve read the novel, to bypass reading the novel altogether would be vandalism.”
Sticking in your lane - whether that’s music, food, culture, places, people will only narrow paths. To forge new frontiers you have to expand - explore new eras, find out about historical figures, try to understand differing points of view, speak to a range of people, discover new skills, words, genres and why things happen. Often those who consider themseves the most urbane are actually the most naive, least sophisticated and unworldly. They have assumed their time, generation, age, place, knowledge, or lifestyle is so advanced and forward-moving that anything else is out of touch or quaint and not needed. We grab at well worn tools - your chosen studies are in engineering - so you always use this lens to manage solutions?….or your chosen studies are in visual design - all your problems are only ever solved looking at this topic?
It’s part of the matrix – the weave, the backdrop to a great curriculum adding up to more than the sum of its disparate parts. Who knows what connections can be made down the line from these forays off the beaten track? We can’t be sure – but we can be confident that if we never venture out, the world we create will be a lot less interesting, a lot more confined and make a whole lot less sense.” Tom Sherrington
I often find, when teaching, that learners stick with what they know to draw upon for outcomes and answers. If what they know is limited, and they can’t make connections as they are so used to being fed information, then how can we improve on anything? We stick with what we know, and nothing is innovated, created or developed. Everything becomes homogenous. Which is dull, lacks any problem solving and doesn’t forge new frontiers.
See below for some ideas on expanding learner’s hinterland: