Prologue

From the Educational Engineer Handbook

Students are human beings, individuals. They are entities that are not isolated, they exist within a context, a multivariate ecosystem that encompasses an external environment populated by their school, their extracurriculars, their family, their friends, the zeitgeist. There is also an internal environment whose landscape is populated by their conditioning, their metacognition, their skills, their health, their drivers, just to name a few. These two environments are coupled by a membrane of sensors and behaviours, creating an interface that generates feedback loops that foster self-awareness, agency and growth. Typical tutoring centres focus on school as the external factor, and academic skills as internal factor, bridging them through content exposure and repetition behaviours. There is nothing wrong with that and we all went through that phase, in either side of the spectrum, as the student and as the educator. But all of us also went through the frustration of being consistently short of what our untapped potential promises, again, in either side of the spectrum.

“I am mocked as nerdy if I display enthusiasm towards knowledge.”

“I give the perfect tutoring sessions but they seem to hit a concrete wall.”

Both these situations can be analysed in light of the above-mentioned model: the drives behind my enthusiastic behaviour towards some piece of knowledge - namely curiosity and interests - are poorly received by the peers in my environment, shutting me, my self-perception and exploratory behaviours down. As an educator, my sessions seamlessly target the student’s technical academic skills but fail to consider how their aspirations and their socioeconomic conditioning influence the interest in this subject, thereby reducing adaption of routine behaviours or curiosity.

The corollary of this model is that there is more than meets the eye, there is more than what is explicitly presented, more parts to the system. More importantly, the whole is greater than the sum of those parts, here more true than anywhere. Thus Omniscience is born out of the spite to integrate the different components within the individual, the individual and their environment, their actions and their trajectory, for no meaningful change occurs in isolation.

The mission then is to create intentional learners who are not only prepared for the future, but are omniscient of their present.

-Mafalda Oliveira