Where Do We Go From Here?
This course provided me with additional skills and knowledge about the inquiry process so that I might enhance my teaching practices to craft lessons for my students with a watchful eye towards analysis, humanism and empowerment. This course challenged my assumptions around what an inquiry based project would entail, as I had experienced watered down and corporate versions of this type of teaching practice through my school board. I happily began to realize as I progressed through this course that as “open ended and as creative as [inquiry pedagogy] is, inquiry is not a practice of ‘dreaming up anything’ and ‘anything goes’” but rather inquiry pedagogy does require thoughtful and intuitive instructors who are capable of developing rigorous and complex content that challenges students in larger and fundamental ways of being and knowing (Bai, 46).
I also started to question the ways I engaged my students in inquiry based projects, including taking inspiration from video games and sports where I would have previously seen these areas of inspiration as examples of pandering to the lowest common denominator. After our readings, I recognized that “lurking behind every soccer game or swim meet is a set of interesting and ongoing essential questions” and these questions are “constantly alive because each new game or meet brings a new form of challenge” that engages the individual’s mind in creative ways from a starting point of motivation (McTighe et al, 2013, 17). I had previously been introduced to the concept of gamification in education through instructional books such as “Explore like a Pirate” by Michael Matera. I recognized the efforts by authors like Matera to push teachers out of their comfort zone and embrace new modes of instruction that merged a teacher’s desire for academic rigour with the interests of their students. My concerns with previous attempts to bridge the gap between student ‘interests’ and teaching practice was that I found many of these attempts neglected to express how these schooling options would involve students’ intellectual creativity in complex and unique ways.
Additionally, this course certainly challenged me to think about how inquiry based pedagogy would not become an exercise in ‘discovery based’ learning, where a teacher’s intellectual capacities are discouraged from playing a role in classroom activities in favour of student directed and student developed curricular pursuits. My biased fears around inquiry based pedgagoy slightly echoed various other critics of the inquiry system, such as Margaret Wente, who suggested “that the shift away from teacher-directed instruction to various forms of inquiry and project-based learning with a focus on “the process of learning and not on the content” (para. 9) will lead to a situation where “Alberta’s world-renowned education system will continue to decline” (Scott et al, 2018, 38). This course challenged me to reimagine the concept of inquiry based pedagogy from the perspective of enhancing student connection between their intellectual understandings and their productivity as individuals aiming to progress this world in a positive direction. I am encouraged by the idea that “students who engaged with problem-based learning were better able to transfer knowledge to new problems and had a deeper understanding of key processes, including generating more accurate hypotheses and more coherent explanations” (Scott et al, 2018, 40). I can use the language of inquiry practices as a means of communicating the idea of reality based and authentic learning to students, parents and educators when they question the rigour of a particular project or program.
I am further encouraged to engage in inquiry based learning on account of how seamlessly it applies to the First Peoples Principles of Learning process, especially as it relates to deep explorations of oneself, one’s community and the natural environment an individual exists within. Inquiry based pedagogy provides additional ways of validating why Indigneous ways of teaching and learning strike at the heart of developing thoughtful and engaged members of society as it encourages students to ponder those abstract and complex questions with concrete ideas that can lead to the extraction of deeper concepts. I found elements of the First Peoples Principles of Learning, such as “learning is embedded in memory, history, and story”, assists in extracting the cognitive understandings of a topic by eliciting emotional and imaginative connections to that topic through stories etc.
I am still curious about how to cultivate a spirit of inquiry and curiosity in students when they are surrounded by a society that encourages consumption and the commodification of all elements of life over the care and concern for others in one’s community and natural environment. In fact, my fears that “cultures have come to emphasize extrinsic motivation at every turn” relates to the concept of ‘motivation’ for the initial ‘hook’ for our students (Bauer et al, 2012, 522). What hope do we have for crafting inquiry based projects that encourage students to pursue altruistic communal actions when teachers haven’t acknowledged their own inherent biases towards consumerism, capitalism and materialism that becomes a lens through which they craft projects, outcomes and bigger questions for their subject matter? Educators must acknowledge that “individuals and societies pay a high price for adopting a ubiquitously con- sumerist orientation that may undermine social cohesion” and thus we’d have a more difficult time sparking the imaginative and emotional processes to properly engage the ‘spirit’ of inquiry pedagogy (Bauer et al, 2012, 522).
Bai, H. (2005). What is inquiry? In W. Hare & J. Portelli (Eds.), Key questions for educators (pp. 45–47). Halifax: EdPhil Books.
Bauer, M. A., Wilkie, J. E. B., Kim, J. K., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2012). Cuing Consumerism: Situational Materialism Undermines Personal and Social Well-Being. Psychological Science (0956-7976), 23(5), 517–523. https://doi-org.ezproxy.tru.ca/10.1177/0956797611429579
Judson, G. (2010). A New approach to ecological education: Engaging students’ imaginations in their world. New York: Peter Lang.
A Walking Curriculum: Evoking Wonder and Developing Sense of Place (K-12). Gillian Judson.
McTighe, Jay, and Grant Wiggins. Essential Questions : Opening Doors to Student Understanding, Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sfu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1164262
Scott, D., Smith, C., Chu, M., & Friesen, S. (2018). Examining the Efficacy of Inquiry-based Approaches to Education. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 64, 35-54.