Bubbles and chambers

While reading C. Thi Nguyen’s piece this week on the difference between epistemic bubbles and echo chambers, I wondered how this model would apply to my workplace as a teacher. In public school employment you will see the same people very regularly: you work in neighbouring rooms, talk in the hallways, and attend meetings. Especially if you work on a rural island (as I do), that is your social group and built-in personal learning network all in one – but they are all different in interests, diversely educated, and from different birth dates/locations, which excludes the possibility of the school being an echo chamber, right?

Well… maybe. We adhere to a common set of professional standards, and are in the same union, as a condition of employment. While some are more effuse in their support in troublesome student x/y/z than others, we would all look a bit askance at a coworker who radically differed: belief in humanistic educational philosophy is built into teacher education programs. You likely wouldn’t pass your practicum teaching placements, and thus become a member of the profession, if you lacked that core belief: it’d lead to you not being part of the teaching community, and your absence as a diverse voice at a professional development event. One could term teachers, thus, a group where “general agreement with some core set of beliefs is a prerequisite for membership [and which] creates a significant disparity in trust between member and non-members” (Nguyen 2020), both conditions for Nguyen’s definition of an echo chamber.

When Dr. Shelley Moore gave a talk at a pro-d event earlier this year at my school, we all applauded at the end – a decent percentage of the room even stood to do so! They were a dynamic speaker, and espoused district-approved (as a paid presenter) philosophy related to inclusion in education. It was with caution, thus, that I ventured (to a group chat with 6 similarly-aged coworkers) that I found aspects of the speech… a bit more style than substance. I was prepared to be hushed-up, but found the others had also been underwhelmed. None of us had asked any of our potentially dissenting questions when given a chance to do so – a micro-example for sure, and potentially motivated by a desire to get to lunch on time, but is this the definitive proof of our echo chamber status?

I’m not so certain. While none of us chose to question the speaker, we certainly could have: we might have needed to word it carefully to avoid the perception of ‘hard dissent’ from the groupthink for social credit reasons, but it would have actually been a good pro-d impulse. No admin chastising would have followed, and not just because the cookie table needed attending-to: engagement was the goal of the day. I’m comfortable labeling public school staffs more as epistemic bubbles than true echo chambers in Nguyen’s model as a result, as long as individuals take the time to respectfully voice opinions that drive conversations forward.

To grow as professionals it is sometimes necessary to engage with challenging viewpoints, which is amplified in an isolated location like the one I work in. When we expand our personal learning networks past the break room walls we become more ‘bubble’ than ‘chamber’, which is the best choice available in a self-selecting professional group that will have more in common than not as a matter of course. Teachers tend to be a friendly crew, but as Nguyen says “[f]riends make for good parties, but poor information networks”(2020) – to keep the ‘bubble’ inflated, we have to blow some hot air.

Source used:

Nguyen, C. Thi. (2020). Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles. Episteme, Vol.17, 141-161. https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2018.32