Berry Billingsley Awarded £1.5M for Epistemic Insight Initiative

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Berry Billingsley discusses epistemic insight – "knowledge about knowledge"

KENT, United Kingdom--()--Berry Billingsley, a professor of science education at Canterbury Christ Church University and director of LASAR (Learning about Science and Religion), has announced the Epistemic Insight Initiative. Running through 2022, the project seeks to help UK teachers and students ask big questions and discover new insights into how knowledge works.

The Epistemic Insight Initiative launched on 16 May on “Big Questions Day” at Canterbury Christ Church University. BBC Breakfast filmed the event, which was attended by hundreds of school students and university teacher education students. Participants learned about epistemic insight (EI) through interactive workshops with scholars from diverse disciplines.

Over the course of the next five years, the Epistemic Insight Initiative will host a series of events. 2020 will witness a “Big Questions” event at Westminster Abbey and an international conference at the University of Oxford. Through these events and groundbreaking research, the initiative seeks to raise awareness of EI and equip primary and secondary level educators with the means to teach it in their classrooms.

“Can a robot fall in love? Does space go on forever? Why does the universe exist? These are the kinds of big questions that students love to ask,” says Billingsley. “But they’re often left in the 'too hard' bucket at school because they rarely have simple, agreed-upon answers. The Epistemic Insight Initiative is designed to meet this challenge.”

The initiative gives teachers a suite of questions—big, medium, and small—which children will investigate through different disciplinary lenses. Workshops will aim to enrich students’ understanding of what it means to be human and help them make discoveries about the nature of knowledge itself.

As part of its Big Questions in Classrooms initiative (BQiC), the Templeton World Charity Foundation awarded Billingsley £1M. The project will receive additional funding from other sources, including the Royal Academy of Engineering, the National Collaborative Outreach Programme, and All Saints Education Trust. With this support, the project will bring together eight institutions of higher learning.

Visit www.epistemicinsight.com.

About Templeton World Charity Foundation

Since 1996, Templeton World Charity Foundation has served as a global philanthropic catalyst for discoveries about big questions of the universe in areas at the intersection of science, theology, philosophy, and society. Founded by Sir John Templeton, it fosters ambitious thinking and creative communications on diverse topics.

Contacts

Kristen VanBlargan
kristen@advisors.world

Contacts

Kristen VanBlargan
kristen@advisors.world