Misconception?

Five or so years ago schools began talking more about misconceptions.

It was a part of the greater focus on curriculum.

It became an on-trend word – appearing on documents, lesson plans, quality assurance, lesson observation forms and lots of other places too.

It still pops up everywhere.

What misconceptions will children have and how we can identify them? How can we correct and pre-empt them? How do we head them off?

But there are issues with the word ‘misconception’ – a misconception of misconceptions if you like, and it’s a particular problem in history.

The first problem is people sometimes use the word to describe things that weren’t really misconceptions – for example a teacher describing blank answers on tests as “misconceptions” when they really meant the child who’d taken the test just didn’t know the answer.

Perhaps this doesn’t matter that much and just irritates me because I like words to mean what the person using them wants them to mean.

There’s more too it though.

I wonder why the term misconception caught on so fast though and suspect it’s an example of genericism pulling us towards misleading uniformity unless we struggle actively against it – the idea there are more commonalities between disciplines than is really the case because this makes it easier to organise and deliver things at scale.

In his Hidden Lives of Learners, Graham Nuthall does a good job defining and exemplifying what a misconception really is.

He describes a child who believes that the needle of a compass is affected by the direction of the wind, and how this blocks their ability to learn from their teacher the real reason is to do with magnetism.

This is a true misconception – an incorrect belief that acts as an obstacle to learning the truth because it has been absorbed and accepted.

Misconceptions are more relevant to some subjects than to others.

We might expect science and physical geography to vulnerable to misconceptions because they deal with things students may have wondered or asked about before. Children – for example – may have wondered why a compass needle moves the way it does, or why water only runs one way down a river if they have experience of seeing a parent using a compass or have visited rivers.

Their misconception – at heart a noble attempt to make sense of the world – might come from within them or might be constructed by an interaction with someone who didn’t know the right answer but thought they did; memorably in the Nuthall example it came from a charismatic student who managed to spread it through half his class without his teacher cottoning on.

More abstract subjects such as history and English Literature are likely to be less vulnerable to misconceptions and more vulnerable to just not knowing, because children are less likely to develop misconceptions about things they have never encountered.

The difference is important because if the likelihood of misconception is overstated then curriculum might be affected.

Take – for example – a history Year 7 unit on the Anglo Saxon England.

A misconception based on assumptions about what lots of people think might be that Anglo-Saxon society was brutish and uncivilized because they were not literate.

Current scholarship reveals this to be incorrect. Non-literate societies are no less ingenious than literate one. The Anglo Saxons had sophisticated governance and were skilled craftspeople.

But most children do not have this misconception – they do not think the Anglo Saxons were brutish.

They just don’t know much about Anglo-Saxons.

By assuming they have a misconception teachers and schools can waste time focusing on things of limited relevance to real children in classrooms. To deal with the misconception the teacher might even have to teach it first – by saying something like “now some people think that the Anglo Saxons were less intelligent than us because they couldn’t read or write”, which might make children feel there might be validity in this belief when they’d never thought this themselves.

History may be uniquely vulnerable to this because of the way it works, with newer scholarship challenging older scholarship and out-of-date work constructed as a misconception. The problem is that misconception is only held by those who have studied the antecedent scholarship but not the critique of it – and this is something unlikely to be true of most children, who are more likely to have never learned about it at all. It’s also important to note much of what we now regard to be “true” will itself become superseded by new scholarship and become a misconception in future years – although it is hard to do when convinced by an argument, we should fight against the idea that there’s anything exceptional about us and that we have arrived at a more empirical “truth” than our predecessors.

This is all complicated further by assumptions and generalisation we make about children that might not be true.

Take – for example – the idea children believe medieval people were stupid and ignorant because of their belief that God was the direct cause of all things that happened on earth. This “misconception” might be held by children from secular backgrounds, but in a school containing a large proportion of children from traditional religious backgrounds it is much less likely.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out how the assumption what we think and believe is what the children we teach think and believe is unsafe and how this can affect substantive curricular choices too.

It’s quite common to hear history curricular decisions justified by saying some subjects – such as the Norman Conquest and the Tudors – have become old and tired and should be replaced.

This isn’t a good reason.

What might be old and tired to us can still be new and exciting to a child and to deprive them of it just because familiarity has made it dull to us would be unfair – indeed often what is old and tired only feels this way because the curriculum doesn’t reflect modern scholarship.

Historians have not stopped writing about the Tudors!

This isn’t to say – of course- that curriculum should not be adapted and updated, but when it is it should be based on what’s best for the children in our classrooms not what’s most interesting to us.

To do so wouldn’t be a misconception – it’d be a mistake.