Brief Encounter

Fostering a vocabulary for working with uncertainty

Opportunities for Embracing Uncertainty

Life, the world and lots of professions are full of uncertainty. This invitation places the unknown at the heart of how our world functions. Students might consider how situations of uncertainty make them feel, and how much uncertainty they feel they encounter on in their everyday lives.

Opportunities for All Students

This invitation is suitable for students of all ages as it can adapt to different levels of complexity when considering how we all have to manage situations of uncertainty. In the early years, it may be used to discuss situations that characters in stories find themselves in – how do these situations make the characters feel? For other students, the example words can represent the launch of a much greater list of words that they associate with uncertainty as they depict these using cartoons as the imagery.

Opportunities for Creative Thinking

The activity can generate discussion about the creative possibilities of uncertainty. Are students able to embrace uncertainty with enthusiasm or only with fear? Can they identify ways in which uncertainty might create something new? Is uncertainty a necessary part of life? Is uncertainty the key to society making progress, searching for new solutions, making new discoveries? Is it possible to create conditions in which we all feel comfortable with being in a position of uncertainty? Students might be encouraged to use a particular medium to draw, such as a cartoon.

Opportunities for Linking to Climate Justice

A focus on uncertainty throws up how some groups experience greater uncertainty in their lives than others due to social and economic precarities. This includes many living in the Global South, but also those locally experiencing food poverty and a lack of appropriately insulated housing, for example. Students could be asked to think how schools can be a place to explore lived uncertainties, in order that they might go out into the world more equipped to respond to their multiple daily challenges where no trusted teacher is to hand. They might consider whether there are cultural differences in how we embrace uncertainty. This links to themes in Vinita’s film about young people in India (Topic 2), and here is a resource on how pastoralists globally respond to uncertainties: https://seeingpastoralism.org/an-uncertain-world

Visual Encounter

Thinking metaphorically using an image

Opportunities for Embracing Uncertainty

There is enough in this image that will be familiar to students but also much that is left open for them to consider ideas of the unknown. To answer the question, they will have to draw on experience, imagine possibilities and engage with their own feelings. They might begin to think of getting lost as a metaphor for feeling one’s way through a landscape and how this can offer potential to explore new paths and the unexpected, as well as inducing anxieties. Students will probably have great questions of their own that they may want to offer and/or explore. Useful prompts can include: what, where, why, how, who?

Opportunities for All Students

Younger students might play at going on a journey or an adventure and think about what they might need to pack. This could tie in with related stories, such as Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury, where children work things out together and support each other along the way.  Other students can share stories of their own experiences of getting lost, either quite literally or more broadly, including in their studies or relationships. This can evoke a multiplicity of feelings to be explored. Students might talk about what supports them to navigate these situations in ways that remain open to their possibilities and do not simply respond to felt risks.

Opportunities for Creative Thinking

This activity offers opportunities to expand on the idea of getting lost as a metaphor, that can be developed using different media, including literature and the arts (e.g. a labyrinth). They might speak about getting lost in something they are engrossed in.

Students could also plan to go somewhere where it is possible to get lost for a while, with a supportive teacher nearby. This might be a park or woods. For younger students, this could be an area of the school or outdoors with which they are unfamiliar. Discussing the risks and how to mitigate these would be key to the students’ planning.

Opportunities for Linking to Climate Justice

Students can be invited to draw on their own cultural references, including linguistic backgrounds, family stories, films or books, myths or religious parables, that might play on the contradictions of both the possibilities and risks of getting lost. This can lead to a discussion of what might be discovered by getting lost, that otherwise could not be known.

Deliberative Encounter

Uncertainty as a driver of new knowledge

Opportunities for Embracing Uncertainty

The films immerse us in the world of uncertainty through the lens of three very different experts seeking solutions within their roles. It is important that students have opportunities to interrogate knowledge, including that espoused by experts, in order to consider its veracity and relevance to their own lives.

What things stand out as most significant to the students? How do the accounts make them feel? What role does uncertainty play in all our lives, and in the lives of professionals seeking to explore the world and how to change it? Is there any action that might follow from what the students have identified as important to them from the films?

Opportunities for All Students

Younger students might find it easiest to engage with Vinita’s film, whereas others could watch them all. More experienced students might engage deeply with Peter’s film: they can also discuss whether the experts convey qualities that enable them to engage with uncertainty in ways that students think might be helpful in their lives.

Opportunities for Creative Thinking

The films offer the opportunity to engage with a range of creative responses. As the students watch, they can be invited to draw, doodle or note take anything that comes to mind. This can help to surface responses (including thoughts, feelings, associations, ideas). The invitation to create an artwork in response to Vinita’s film might be supported by enabling students to spend time viewing the pictures drawn by the young people in India.

Opportunities for Linking to Climate Justice

Vinita’s film draws attention to the types of uncertainties experienced in one area of the world. It can be used to prompt a discussion of our global connections and responsibilities to those we do not know. What might we learn from these young people living in such climate-challenged environments?

Beyond the Classroom Encounter

Out of uncertainty comes change

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Faced with huge challenges and uncertainties, experts across all fields have made significant discoveries that change the way many people live.

Talk with friends and family to identify a discovery in each of the four areas above that you think is interesting to share in some way.

Vinita Damodaran, Perpetua Kirby, Andy Lowe, Pete Newell, John Parry, Marcelo Staricoff, Adam Vaughn, Rebecca Webb