Hinterlands

Hinterland Knowledge

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about structuring lessons and curriculum, both in and outside of RE and trying to develop more meaningful interconnectivity between knowledge. I’ve also been planning an ongoing Dungeons and Dragons (DnD hereafter) campaign for a wonderfully nerdy group of Year 9s and realised they rely on similar mechanisms. I’m not the first educator to stumble on this link (example), nor will I be the last, but it helped me reframe my thinking on Hinterland knowledge. I also saw Dune 2 with my wife, having convinced her to watch Dune with me.

I’ll make the obligatory link to Christine Counsell here as she seemed to coin the term ‘hinterland’ knowledge, but its a concept that any decent Dungeon Master is intimately familiar with, we just know it as ‘world building’. I hope Christine secretly runs DnD sessions with a group of academics somewhere, and that at least one of the many blogs on Hinterland from Dungeon Masters was penned in secret to prevent her group from getting campaign spoilers.

Hinterland knowledge is one of the foundational reasons for using academic specialists as teachers. If you’ve ever experienced that moment of loss as you try to find a decent analogy in a cover lesson for an unfamiliar subject, you know why hinterland knowledge matters. Is it crucial, perhaps not; is it illuminating, absolutely. It’s not the big showy stuff that people hinge whole lessons on, but it is the stuff that acts as hinges between content. It gives knowledge some flexibility. It’s those little flashes of what Bertrand Russell called ‘ornamental knowledge’ that show you care about the tiniest minutiae that relates to this topic, and help to indicate a level of commitment to this knowledge. When people recall important knowledge, it’s often the mention of the little details that give away whether they really know their stuff.

Ofsted use the example of the Viking Raids on Lindisfarne as an exemplar for hinterland knowledge, they suggest children ought to know about how Christianity in Britain developed; how monks lived, what they believed and what a monastery is for; the geography of Lindisfarne itself. In and of themselves, none of these data are sufficient, nor are they necessary but you would have a poorer understanding of the raids without them. The hinterland is enriching, it provides space for growth and roots from which mountains can rise.

In D&D (and Dune) we enter an unfamiliar world, with different rules, social norms and worldviews to our own. In many lessons within Humanities we do the same. A world that contains people who might seem like they ought to be familiar, but with enough unfamiliarity to be ‘other’. The feeling of uncanny comes from a plausibility that is denied to us. What makes the monk in Lindisfarne so alien is not any lack of humanity, it is the small details that make his world uncannily different to ours. I remember visiting Lindisfarne a few years back having watched The Last Kingdom; I felt like I knew the place from my studies, but arriving on the Island was a little underwhelming. We parked in a very busy little car park, walked past a row of houses which all seemed to sell produce from their gardens and had a jacket potato from a cafe (tasty, but not enriching per se). The windswept, rugged island I had built in my head bore little resemblance to the one before my eyes. It all felt very mundane. I knew what it was going to be like, I wasn’t transported to the 8th Century as I had imagined. My little boy and I discussed the island, he had been promised Vikings, and so far it was more Dad’s car than Drakkar. (Google it, I’m funny.) As we found the Priory, things started to click. We discussed what it must have been like to walk across the Island without roads (and cafes), I explained how the monks would have lived, and what they would have done with their time and why the Island was selected for a Priory in the first place. The little details started to click together bigger bits of knowledge, they seasoned the information his eyes were feeding him and helping his brain to really get the flavour of the place. As we walked along the island to the castle, the timeless elements of the place (the weather, wildlife and wilder landscape) spoke to us on an existential level. Away from the familiar, we could place ourselves in the world of the monks and vikings and imagine the history taking place around us, brought to life by small details stitching a large narrative together and grounding the unfamiliar in the familiar. It is a favourite memory of ours to discuss, as the hinterland knowledge brought it all to life. No longer mere jewels of substantive wealth, but a piece of jewellery where those jewels are bound together and framed in the precious metals of hinterland knowledge.

Dungeon Masters do the same, but it’s easier to explain it in these terms than in educational ones as I can remove many of you from the condition of expert blindness. Baldur’s Gate 3 has been one of the most successful video games of the past year, winning many awards. Many of my students have discussed the game with me, as they know I do DnD. When I played the game myself, I really enjoyed the attention to detail that the designers had paid to a world I love. The game is steeped in nearly 50 years of canon and lore, and so the hinterlands are immense in such a world. For a novice playing, they see cool monsters and spells, they play as races which look fun or have representational appeal. The game has a cool story, and ends inexplicably at level 12. For those old grognards who have played for a while, we saw everything the novices did, but we also saw the connective tissue of small narratives played out as hinterland knowledge; we saw race and class combinations that didn’t make sense to many older players, but could embrace it as long as there was sufficient narrative justification. We knew the places we were visiting, and walking into Baldur’s Gate was a genuine thrill. The game ends at level 12, despite the actual level cap being 20 for a few reasons that only make sense if you have the hinterland knowledge. If you know the game, you’ll know that level 13+ adventures are bonkers, you essentially cross the threshold in to being a functional demigod, able to control time, space and causality. This would ruin a video game, so they said no. A fun theory that my friends and I discussed was that a character who is central to the plot is from a race that used to be capped at level 11 (back in 1996), after which point their goddess would see them as potential challengers and destroy them, so level 12 allows this character to just about get away with it. Whilst it may have a mundane answer, my friendship group’s hinterland knowledge allowed us to play around with our knowledge and be creative (even if wrong).

At the beginning of a TV show that is going to rely on previous narrative components, the recap will often linger on those required knowledge elements. In lessons we can use retrieval practice to try and do the same thing cognitively. It is often the background information that conveys meaning, hence the satisfaction of watching Columbo and seeing them flash back to a brief second or two onscreen where you DID see the killer, you just hadn’t noticed. In my DnD group, they had annoyed a particular bad guy whose family are established in lore as using certain symbols to represent them. In many encounters, I had laid clues which clearly linked to this family, but my group missed them and so my story was disrupted because they couldn’t connect the dots. I thought it was obvious, because my expert knowledge was blinding me. The group didn’t see because they are new to DnD, they haven’t learned about the family’s wider habits yet, they just have the core, functional knowledge that allows them shallow access into this world. I’ve prepared a prop, a page from a DnD version of Burke’s Peerage to give them the hinterland knowledge to start connecting nodes of substantive knowledge. The beauty of the seemingly superfluous hinterland knowledge is that it often feels like it’s pointless until it illuminates something crucial, and then it can make all the difference.

RE should thrive on hinterland knowledge. It is not simply about communicating inert lumps of facts and figures, but should absolutely demand that those lumps are orbited by a constellation of relevant anecdotes, analogies and tangential arcs that trace the outlines of a fact and in doing so, make it beautiful. If we want children to love the subject, we should demonstrate our love for it by sweating the ‘messy material that matters’ to paraphrase Christine Counsell again.

Hinterland in RE is largely done for us, most of the major religions already offer great examples in their Hagiographies and Commentaries, their parables and nimshals. These ARE hinterland, the knowledge that is not central, but elucidatory. Whilst those have now largely crossed into the realms of becoming Core knowledge, they were not intended for that. When teaching about Guru Nanak, we might share the story of Supper at Bhai Lalo ji’s House to explain the principle of integrity and good works, but the story sticks for good academically sound reasons; this doesn’t just work for long stories, short anecdotes or allegories can achieve the same result if chosen to help enrich the narrative our core knowledge is underpinning and it’s not just for subjects within the humanities.

If you’ve followed this far, thanks and sorry if I got a little lost along the way, but stories have a habit of doing that…