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Image retrieved June 22, 2010, from https://eee.uci.edu/programs/humcore/images/Antigone/faust.jpg
In most courses I have taken during my twenty-three years of higher education, the exciting new ideas, if there were any, came mostly from the course content. But in this course, the most striking revelations have not come from the course content itself, but from my and my students’ experiences as I applied what I learned in my classroom. What I discovered is that inquiry-based learning can be a pleasure for both the students and the teacher. When we move beyond the traditional research report into more authentic and purposeful investigation, beyond the communication model of teaching into the one that prepares students to learn on their own, beyond traditional literacy into a more comprehensive understanding of modern literacies, we break down the often stifling boundaries of the classroom walls and step into a wider world where ideas and action are powerfully interrelated (Laureate, 2009; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, 2004; Lever-Duffy & McDonald, 2008; Richardson, 2006). This course provides a rationale to justify the ways my students want to learn and I want to teach in terms of the goals we are obligated to achieve.
I have a very successful colleague, beloved among the students, who often talks about “putting a mask on the monster.” By this, he means turning a learning activity into a game or project that is more immediately meaningful, fun, or rewarding than the traditional learning task at its root. His room often appears chaotic to outsiders who cannot easily discern the focus of learning. In fact, it often takes them a minute to locate the teacher in the seemingly chaotic swarm of independently active learners. Teachers who misunderstand this as, at best, merely adding sugar to the medicine or, at worst, wasting time sometimes criticize his methods on the grounds that students must be prepared for a “real world” where serious work is not a game and where you do not expect rewards for good performance. They feel his methods are deceptive, juvenile mollycoddling that ultimately undermine students’ development of the ability to stoically put their noses to their proverbial grindstones, and that immediately undermine other teachers’ ability to carry on business as usual without students complaining and comparing their methods to his.
What this course reveals, particularly through the application of its principles in the classroom, is that meaningful, fun, rewarding assignments where students learn about what interests them and immediately apply learning to a personally consequential tasks are better preparation than many traditional assignments for students who will enter a world where serious work is often very much like a game (as games have become very much like serious work) and where you do, in fact, receive sweet rewards for successful efforts (Laureate, 2009). Teachers routinely assure their students that the seemingly pointless drudgery of their classwork, homework, and projects is necessary preparation for the (presumably seemingly pointless) drudgery of higher learning and the world of work. Perhaps this represents the experience of these teachers, but it somehow fails to represent the greater purpose of education, to produce happy, productive citizens.
As I worked throughout this course to produce an inquiry unit plan to use in the future, I began to apply its principles to the classes I was already teaching. What I discovered is that students are motivated by an authentic purpose to fully engage in independent learning and the processes of inquiry. By proposing to my students that they create a wiki-based text to help other students prepare for the AP Language and Composition examination, I gave them a real purpose, with socially significant consequences, for their application of the inquiry process outlined by Eagleton and Dobler’s (2007) QUEST (Questioning, Understanding Resources, Evaluating, Synthesizing, Transforming) method. Consequently, my students, rather than groaning as I imposed instruction and assignments for each stage of a research report only their teacher would see, sought my guidance as they worked to produce a quality product for a wider audience.
As they worked to understand the wiki medium, refine their Internet research skills, and synthesize and transform information to serve their shared purpose, they constructed an understanding together, using me as a consultant on technology, information retrieval, and legal issues. In that role, I shared with them the stages of Eagleton and Dobler’s (2007) QUEST inquiry method, the critical thinking skills represented in November’s (2008) REAL (Reading the URL, Examining the Content, Asking about Authors and Owners, Looking at the Links) evaluation system, and the legal, ethical, and practical issues associated with intellectual property and fair use of source material. Through this experience, they transformed from a classroom of reluctantly cooperative students to a corporation of enthusiastically cooperative and collaborative learners.
My learning from this course will have a profound effect on my future teaching. First, I do plan to use the inquiry-based unit plan I developed in a universal themes inquiry unit to replace the traditional research report assignment with my seniors next year. Moreover, I expect that my new, broader understanding of what literacy means will influence my teaching throughout my career (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007; November, 2008). And, although I enjoy unusual autonomy in my classroom, I feel better prepared to justify my novel approach to literacy learning if it is ever challenged. From now on, neither I nor my students will ever need to dread the research project that has haunted scholars for as long as I can remember. Rather, I fully expect the inquiry unit to be the highlight of my courses, the talk of the school, and a source of pride for my students.
For me, as for my students, the best way to learn is by applying the knowledge I have, and developing the knowledge I need, to accomplish a meaningful task (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007). In that spirit, my primary professional development goal is to apply the knowledge I have gained through this course in my own teaching and inquiry, and to augment and refine that knowledge through its use. This means making information literacy and inquiry a central part of the curriculum of every course I teach. I can imagine no more effective way to prepare my students and myself for an uncertain future than to teach and practice the skills of purposeful questioning, locating and evaluating information, and synthesizing and transforming it into something new that others can experience and appreciate (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007, Laureate, 2009; Leu et al., 2004).
I once believed that the goal of education was to become “learned”—a past-tense verb used as an adjective to describe a condition of final achievement. I am beginning to realize, however, that this state can never be finally reached. My goal for future learning no longer includes one day resting on my laurels. Rather, I now see continuing education as a goal in its own right. Of course, learning can serve the purposes of production, of creating something new and valuable to improve one’s life and the world. But, at the same time, these products may ultimately serve the cause of learning for its own sake. Like Faust, I want to know everything. But, unlike Faust, I and my students no longer have to make a deal with the Devil, because I am beginning to understand that a good teacher does not have to cover the face of the monster of learning with a mask. Instead, I need only remove the monster mask that has, for too long, disfigured the truly beautiful face of inquiry learning.
References
Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for internet inquiry. New York: The Guilford Press.
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom. Baltimore: Author.
Leu, D. J., Kinzer, C. K., Coiro, J. L., & Cammack, D. W. (2004). Toward a theory of new literacies emerging from the internet and other information and communication technologies. In Ruddell, R.B. & Unrau, N.J., (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (5th ed.). (pp. 1570–1613). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Lever-Duffy, J. & McDonald, J. (2008). Theoretical Foundations. In Teaching and Learning with Technology (3rd ed. pp. 2–35 ). Boston: Pearson.
November, A. (2008). Web literacy for educators. Thousands Oaks: Corwin Press.
Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
