Let me introduce you to something that I call metacontent. This post is an excerpt from chapter 4 of Difference Maker.
Key idea:
Sharing our fundamental distinctions with students helps them reduce the possible variety of interpretations of our subject.
Sometimes I have experienced – as a student myself – biology courses that felt one-dimensional. There was a path that involved the collecting of facts along the way. I suppose understanding was seen either as a summation of knowledge tokens or implicitly left to the learner to construct alone.
More recently, major institutions of science education have acted to organise curricula to help students see structure among the content. There are, for example, the Big Ideas of Harlen et al. (2010; 2015), and the Royal Society of Biology's Big Questions (RSB 2021). Equally, the International Baccalaureate's 2023 biology syllabus is organised into four themes.
What these have in common is the distinction between two types of content: 1. Content, and 2. Metacontent: a special type of content that informs students about the content.
Metacontent is the content about the content or, in other words, the content that makes explicit “how the content of the course should be seen”.
But what is metacontent exactly? Think about it this way. Seen from information theory (Shannon 1948) in telecommunications between machines, redundancy was to be avoided. The less repetitive the message was, the better.
Gregory Bateson (1972, 110), however, knew that communication between humans was different:
“The essence and raison d'etre of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information, and/or the reduction of the random by ‘restraint’.”
For Bateson, it was the redundancy of human communication – its repetitiveness – that allowed people to perceive patterns. By the same pattern appearing in several communicative events, it becomes meaningful, and something to take note of (Harries-Jones 2016).
The trouble with the courses I had experienced as a student was a lack of redundancy. Each lesson appeared to bring new information with scant repetition or redundancy, which would have allowed me to perceive any implicit patterns.
The theme of this chapter is helping students reduce the complexity of what they themselves interpret. So, how does metacontent help?
Bateson's use of the word “restraint” (or constraint) is useful here, so let me repeat the quote: “The essence and raison d'etre of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information, and/or the reduction of the random by ‘restraint’.” (1972, 110).
Metacontent helps restrain students to fewer ways of interpreting the content of the course. By making metacontent explicit, the teacher shares how the content should be perceived (at least in a way that's compatible with the teacher's perception). Metacontent therefore reduces the variety of ways of seeing the course content.
Bateson saw ways of being and seeing as arising from an ecology of ideas (1972). Bateson would call himself a cyberneticist, but he had studied biology at Cambridge and subsequently revolutionised the field of anthropology with his, then-wife Margaret Mead (Chaney 2017).
At the time, perspectives in anthropology were based on seeking an objective truth about a culture from the outside. Bateson shifted perspectives in the opposite direction. He saw that participating in a culture was the only way to acquire viable knowledge about it (Glasersfeld 2007).
An ecology of ideas isn't fully understandable from the outside without insight into the interacting system of concepts a person, or a culture, holds. This is easily perceived when observing another teacher of a different specialism, and who is halfway through a two-year course. As you observe, many things go straight over your head. The content, the questions, yes, but also the actions and reactions of the class.
Only the members of the system – those with a shared ecology of ideas – compatibly understand what's happening.
Isn't this, at least, one purpose of teaching our subjects in schools? Inviting students into an ecology of ideas? Helping them see how a biologist sees. Not just as spectators who take peculiar words as memorabilia to be uttered here and there. But to see with the ecosystem of concepts in some form or another.
While studying biology is seen as learning about living systems, it can also be seen as an anthropology of biologists, with us (teachers) as their hosts. Through recursive interactions we don't simply teach content to our students, but a way of living through our subject. Such that students don't just learn biology, they learn biology teachers (Maturana 2011, 162). And this way of being is something our students may continue beyond our time together in the classroom.
This is where I see metacontent playing a role in curricular design and enactment. Metacontent acts as a frame for an ecology of ideas to develop. As discussed in the second chapter, all thought must stem from assumptions, or distinctions.
Our students arrive with their own assumptions, distinctions, and ways of seeing. Metacontent invites students to see the course content through domain-specific assumptions shared by members of the subject guild.
I believe that bigger ideas are unlikely to be perceived by students experiencing a course taught from a content-only view.
Metacontent is the concept that I have come to perceive as the curricular means for explicitly helping students discern those bigger ideas and patterns. It would be wrong, however, to say that metacontent is purely a holistic concept. Instead, I see metacontent and content as mutually
dependent – mutually forming and mutually shaping.
Like how the Earth shapes how life evolves, and life itself shapes how the Earth system evolves (Margulis 1998). And Winston Churchill's (1943) vision that, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Both content and metacontent feed into each other recursively.
Therefore, I see content and metacontent comprising a two-cycle model (see the model above).
The first cycle is that of content. The details of a course – the models and procedures we teach. This cycle involves the learning and application of content in the questions and tasks we give students. Upon application of the content, errors and incoherence generate feedback so that the student reconsiders their original understanding of the content.
However, this cycle sits within a second cycle: the metacontent. Metacontent informs students on how the content should be seen. It encourages students to search for the same patterns they've seen before.
This recursive process encourages students to perform complexity reduction for themselves. And, in circularity, the perception of many examples of metacontent – over many contexts and topics – feeds back to inform their understanding of metacontent itself.
Therefore, the two cycles feed into each other positively. The more they grasp the metacontent the more students will see the patterns in the content, which allows them to access the content better. This, in turn, gives them more practice thinking with the metacontent, by generalising it over new contexts and examples.
In this sense, metacontent doesn't just help students reduce complexity, it can become a major goal of the course itself.
Ultimately, when students have finished formal education in our subject, we must ask what will persist. We all intuitively know that forgetting occurs. As time passes the details begin to fade. What remains of all our mutual efforts as students embark on life outside the classroom? I propose that well-planned metacontent can form part of a web of an ecology of ideas that persists.
For the classroom biology teacher, I believe it could help solve another problem. The two loops proceed at a different pace. The content cycle is fast, involving many cycles per lesson before we move on to the next topic.
Yet, the metacontent loop cycles more slowly and always revisits what came before. When faced with the inevitable variation in our students' outcomes in our classroom, a content-only model can seem unjust. As some students speed ahead in the content loop, others advance more slowly.
Lower attainers may access the content at a more superficial level. As we pass from topic to topic, not all students appear to learn a topic to the depth we'd like. The gap widens as the system demands we keep moving through the curriculum.
The school system – by its very structure of timed courses and age-grouping – inevitably produces disparities (Allen et al. 2021). But we can choose the emphasis on the content so that all
students can find the meaning of deeper ideas.
When explicitly adding metacontent all students could advance towards a deeper understanding of the metacontent itself. All students get the opportunity to revisit fundamental ideas that they can take with them beyond the classroom.
In the following sections, I'll explore two types of metacontent. The first is a set of principles – a teacher's fundamental distinctions – to be seen and applied throughout the topics of a course. The second is understanding what understanding is in biology.
If you want to read more about metacontent and finish this chapter, then learn more in Difference Maker. Download the first chapters my books here.
References
See here.