Inquiry: A "Place" for the Transformative

I believe as an educator I must create conditions through which my students engage in substantive inquiry so they may transform their own beliefs and practices as educators. I believe the depth of my beliefs is best demonstrated through my actions within my classroom. Specifically, an assignment I give for C & I 402, Reflective Teaching Practices, demonstrates my beliefs and values regarding inquiry and education. Throughout the course of the semester, I work with my students to more fully understand "inquiry." We define inquiry, analyze processes that constitute inquiry, and critically examine inquiry within a variety of contexts: personal, instructional, institutional, and societal.  Ultimately, each student must create a model that identifies necessary conditions for inquiry within the four previously mentioned contexts.

From the beginning of the semester, I argue that we cannot impose or transmit learning on others.   Inquiry is an inherent capacity within each person. To the degree that we create the conditions within which inquiry can emerge, we create the potential for educative experiences. In addition, to the degree that we guide the process of inquiry toward substantive goals, we fulfill our ethical responsibilities as educators. Therefore, we must acknowledge the ontological interdependence of the learning environment and our educational aims, goals, and objectives.

To achieve this aim, my students and I create an environment within which we think systematically about our assumptions and beliefs as well as the impact of those assumptions and beliefs upon our practices. During C & I 402, students read John Dewey's How We Think, and while reading the book, they wrestle with the meaning of inquiry and its implications within their teaching. They define, analyze, and synthesize the work of John Dewey, Paulo Freire¹, and others as they attempt to define more deeply and analyze more astutely their personal and collective notions of inquiry. Throughout the course of the semester the students work together to forge a deeper understanding of inquiry, and by the end of the semester each student creates a model to demonstrate the necessary conditions of inquiry within their personal lives, their classrooms, their schools, and society. In addition to creating the model, students must make all or part of their conceptualization of inquiry instrumental. Thus, they cannot retreat into theory alone. They must demonstrate the vital link between theory and practice through their model.

The results from this assignment have been remarkable. Students have generated transformative instruments through which they have drastically altered conditions both within their classrooms and within their schools. In other words, they were not just "good," they were good for something. One student used the instrument to defend curriculum changes within his math department. Another student used her instrument as a focal point for group discussion with other teachers during their lunch periods. One teacher created a very ideologically sophisticated model with Legos. She keeps the model in a prominent place in her room, and when the students are engaged in problem solving, she refers to the model and discusses aspects of inquiry with her fifth graders.  It has truly been exciting to see the potential of the "Models of Inquiry" assignment over the past year, and I am currently in the beginning stages of writing an article with three students from three different semesters regarding the project and its impact on their teaching.

I truly believe inquiry must be the focus of our lives as educators. Collectively, my students and I must think systematically about our beliefs and assumptions, and we must critically examine the impact of those beliefs and assumptions on our practices. Therefore, I must create the appropriate space within my classroom for this to happen

Beliefs I Hold Regarding Teaching

1.  The person who does the work is the person who is learning.

As an assistant principal, I had the pleasure of bus duty each day. I loved this task, for I was able to watch the children as they began and ended their days at school. One thing I always noticed was the amazing amount of energy the students had at the end of the day. I often had to help them "contain" that energy as they hurried to their buses.

In contrast, I would enter the school building at the end of bus duty and see the teachers dragging themselves to their mailboxes utterly exhausted. It was quite clear from my observations that the teachers had done all the work each day, not the students. This fact was supported in my visits to their rooms where I would see teachers who had spent hours pulling together information to give to their students and then additional hours reading the worksheets the students completed to demonstrate that they had received that information.

I believe Dewey addressed the situation best in School and Society, when he described the trouble he had finding desks for his laboratory school. He noted that after looking in shop after shop, one salesperson finally commented that he wanted tables where children could work, but the shop only had desks where children could listen. Similarly, in Democracy and Education he laments:

Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice? That teaching is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active and constructive process is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory.¹

I believe my students must be actively engaged in the learning process. The person or person(s) with the most investment of energy and commitment within a course will ultimately get the most from the course. Therefore, I strive to create situations in which my students work. I do not hand them packaged rhetoric or theories, nor do I tell them "one right way" to align a curriculum or to critique an issue. I offer contexts, ideological and organizational frameworks, and challenges from which they approach the content of my courses.

In addition, I pay close attention to a warning Dewey gives,

Nothing can be developed from nothing; nothing but the crude can be developed out of the crude - and this is what surely happens when we throw the child back upon his achieved self as a finality, and invite him to spin new truths of nature or of conduct out of that.²

Therefore, I know that I cannot merely throw ideological or methodological challenges toward my students with no support or guidance. Rather, I work continually to effectively negotiate my roles as teacher-facilitator and teacher-scholar. I pose questions and offer ideas, analogies, and examples so that my students can forge their understanding of the course experiences and expectations.

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¹ John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan Company, 1944), 38.

² John Dewey, The School and Society The Child and the Curriculum (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 196.

2. Continual inquiry is a professional and ethical necessity to ensure the educative­ness of classroom experiences.

If I want my students, most of whom are current teachers, to actively and continually engage in inquiry about themselves, their classrooms, their schools, and their society, I must model inquiry in an explicit manner. To accomplish this, I often explain to students my rationale for choosing certain assignments or for changing assignments from one semester to the next. I talk to them about what I have learned from previous classes, so they can see the benefits of examining one's self and one's practices.

However, while it is necessary to model craft reflection³, it is not sufficient. I must also model a sense of professional artistry within my teaching. I must demonstrate a deep concern for the multi-dimensional context of teaching, taking into account the social, political, phenomenological, and aesthetic dimensions of the manner in which we all teach, learn, and live. To achieve this, I try to model a purposeful curiosity to serve the public good. Through my work as a teacher of teachers, I try to esteem something greater than myself. I work in such a way that my work, including time in class, communications through phone and email, scholarship, and service become greater than the sum of their parts. And I expect the same of my students as well. I do not want them to feel as if they are completing assignments for me merely to acquire points and get a grade. I want them to see the professional and ethical significance of their work as a whole. As Dewey notes,

There is an old saying to the effect that it is not enough for a man to be good; he must be good for something. The something for which a man must be good is capacity to live as a social member so that what he gets from living with others balances with what he contributes. What he gets and gives as a human being, a being with desires, emotions, and ideas, is not external possessions, but a widening and deepening of conscious life - a more intense, disciplined, and expanding realization of meanings. . . . And education is not a mere means to such a life. Education is such a life.⁴

3. In order to create a vibrant public space within a classroom where continual inquiry can thrive, the teacher and students must acknowledge and sustain a relationship of mutual vulnerability.

When I first came to Illinois State University, I struggled with my professional identity and the kind of relationship that I should develop with my students. Within a matter of months, I went from being a doctoral student to teaching doctoral students. In addition, as a doctoral student, I had deliberately worked with the professors who were the strongest scholars and who had the highest expectations. How was I to ever measure up to their example?

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³ The notion of craft reflection stems from Alan Tom's work that regards teaching as a moral craft. James Henderson extended this notion in his book, Reflective Teaching:  Professional Artistry through Inquiry (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Merrill Prentice Hall. 1996). In this book, Henderson defines craft reflection as that reflection on the technical aspects of teaching. Henderson extends the notion of craft reflection to address that which goes beyond technique - the kind of inquiry that addresses a public obligation in a democratic society. He refers to this broader form of inquiry in teaching as professional artistry.

⁴ John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan Company, 1944), 359-360.

While I still find myself struggling with this issue at times, I have, in some way, found peace within the work of Paulo Freire. In his last book, Pedagogy of Freedom, Freire reminds me that we are all unfinished beings, and as such, we are to embrace our roles as life-long learners. Above all else, this continuous process of learning requires me to be humble. He notes, "How can I respect the curiosity of my students if, lacking genuine humility and a convinced understanding of the role of the unknown in the process of the known, I am afraid of revealing my own ignorance?"⁵

When I approach my graduate students as a humble, unfinished being, driven by a strong desire to better understand the world so that I might be a more valued instrument for the world, I believe I model what it means to work toward public intellectualism. Through this, I believe I create authentic relationships with my students that support mutuality and trust. Under such conditions, I believe we can acknowledge the insights, perceptions, and varied levels of understanding that each of us brings to the learning experience. Thus, I hope to achieve the kind of relationship Freire advocates for teachers and their students:

One of the most important tasks of critical educational practice is to make possible the conditions in which the learners, in their interaction with one another and with their teachers, engage in the experience of assuming themselves as social, historical, thinking, communicating, transformative, creative persons; dreamers of possible utopias, capable of being angry because of a capacity to love.⁶

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⁵ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom (Boston: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 65.

 ⁶ Ibid, 45.