What a year-long school project on Japan taught me about ‘learning in depth’

Some years ago, I was talking to a friend who had just returned from Japan. He spoke about the islands he had visited and different aspects of Japanese culture. A few minutes into the conversation, he stopped and asked me, “Have you also been to Japan?” I had not.(Sign up for THEdge, The Hindu’s weekly education newsletter.)It surprised me that I knew so much about the country. I knew the names of Japan’s main islands. I could picture their shapes. I remembered facts about its geography and culture that I had no recollection of learning recently.It took me some time to trace the source. 23 years earlier, when I was in Grade 8, our Geography teacher had assigned us what I considered one of the most boring school projects on Japan.Join THEdge LinkedIn groupThere was no Internet and no computer then. Three of us were assigned Japan and asked to prepare a handwritten project that eventually ran into more than 200 pages. Almost every week, we went to the library, found the encyclopedia on Japan, and copied information from it. The hardest part was copying maps, rivers and pictures by hand.The exercise seemed pointless to me. I even confronted my teacher once and asked why he was making us waste so much time copying from an encyclopedia.But there was one unusual feature of the project: we were given an entire academic year to complete it. So, for ten months, Japan stayed in our lives.A conventional curriculum is often organised very differently:Month 1: rocks and minerals. Month 2: soil. Month 3: plants. Month 4: animals.My project looked more like this:Month 1: Japan. Month 2: Japan. Month 3: Japan. Month 4: Japan. And eventually, Month 10: Japan.This experience has made me wonder whether schools underestimate the educational value of prolonged immersion in a single domain. The argument is not that children should spend hundreds of hours copying encyclopedias. Copying was the weakest aspect of my project.The more interesting question is this: what happens when a child stays with one topic for a sufficiently long period?Canadian education scholar Kieran Egan proposed an unusual response to this problem through an idea called “learning in depth.”His proposal was simple. Children would continue with the regular curriculum, but each child would also be given one topic to study over a very long period, potentially several years. The topic could be almost anything: birds, apples, railways, dust, molluscs or trains.The objective was not that society desperately needed thousands of schoolchildren who were experts on apples or dust. Egan wanted children to experience something that formal schooling seldom gives them: what it feels like to know something deeply.The idea does not require replacing the regular curriculum. It adds a second dimension to it. The regular curriculum exposes children to many areas of knowledge. A prolonged project gives them the experience of staying with one subject long enough for knowledge to accumulate, connect and become their own.What might this look like in a school?Schools could begin quite modestly. Every student could choose one Prolonged Immersion Project at the beginning of an academic year. A child interested in trains could study trains. Another might choose oceans, insects, the human brain, Bengaluru, cricket, dust or chocolates.Instead of a project completed over a frantic weekend, students would contribute to it for perhaps an hour each week.One week they might read. Another week they might draw. They could interview someone, conduct an experiment, visit a place, analyse data, pose questions, photograph something, make a model or explain what they have discovered to their classmates.The crucial ingredient would not be the activity. It would be returning. Week after week. Month after month. Ten months of copying information about Japan could create a permanent space in the brain; imagine spending ten months questioning, investigating, discussing, and making connections about Japan.Perhaps schools should experiment more deliberately with the latter. We rightly want children to encounter many subjects.Abhishek Kariwal is the Co-founder of Thinking Classroom (www.thinkingclassroom.in)