Next year will be the first year since starting the Year 9 Signature Work at Blanchelande in 2021-2 that the format will be unchanged (i.e., the timetable allocation will remain exactly the same), which means that I can focus solely on refining the Inquiry rather than on refining it while also needing to revise it at the same time. So, thinking ahead…

Paulo Freire, in The importance of the act of reading (1983, p. 5), writes that

reading the world precedes reading the word, and the subsequent reading of the word cannot dispense with continually reading the world.

This is inquiry—coming to know and understand reality through learning to accurately and dynamically read the world (experience) and the word (record). Moreover, inquiry is communal. Elsewhere (1970/2005, p. 72), Freire writes that

apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human, [because] knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

Or, writing more than 50 years later, as Jonathan Rauch (2021, p. 4) puts it, while

acquiring knowledge [necessarily involves] personal struggles to find the right questions and assemble mosaic tiles of information to tell the tale coherently, [acquiring knowledge] is a conversation, not a destination…a journey we take together, not alone, [because] others are always involved.

And, as Douglas Knight (1968, p. viii) reminds us, these others

are not limited by our normal boundaries of time, space, and social or economic level (although they can be)

because of the record.

Reading the world necessarily precedes reading the word, because we live, move and have our being in the world before we learn to read about the world, and even after we have learnt to read about the world, we must return to living, moving and having our being in the world. However, because we act in the world and on the world, we change the world even as the world changes us. In our acting in and on the world, we do so not just as thoughtless beasts—although we can, and sometimes do—but also as [deeply] thoughtful beings. It is precisely in our capacity for thoughtful action that reading the word becomes decisive, because the word enlarges the world of possibilities open to us, and in this sense Ludwig Wittgenstein is correct that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Or, as Iris Murdoch is said to say in Iris (2001),

if one doesn’t have words, how does one think?

Now, concerning the reading of the word, Eric O. Springsted, discussing Simone Weil’s notion of attention in Attention, availability, and the reading of books (2025), writes that

if the development of attention—making oneself available—is what is most important for a student, then it is clear that the teacher’s most important task is to make that possible. No one can teach attention, just as one cannot teach insight. It has to come from within the student. But one can give students texts that are worthy of attention, that can be revelatory to them.

The challenge for us, then, is to provide students with and also enable them to find words (texts) that are worthy of their attention/ revelatory to them throughout the inquiry process, which, at a certain point—between Construct and Express—become their own. For their own words to become revelatory to them, and to others, they must come by stages to know what they think by striving to see what they say (attributed by Graham Wallas to an anonymous girl).

Reading [and writing—still to come] throughout the inquiry process:

• Connect | Reading to engage with the text intellectually and emotionally
• Wonder | Reading to enter into dialogue with the text
• Investigate | Reading to make sense of/ know the text (what is the text saying to me?)
• Construct | Reading to find meaning in/ understand the text (what does the text mean to me?)
• Express | Reading to communicate personal knowledge and understanding
• Reflect | Reading to reflect on learning

The theme of this Signature Work is Planet Guernsey: Living well in a world worth living in, and it is framed through the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is embedded in the Year 9 English curriculum—which includes modernist/ modern poetry, which I will return to—and it develops meaningful curricular links with Geography (World Development and Globalisation), History (Industrialisation) and Theology (Creation and Covenant / Catholic Social Teaching).

Finding suitable revelatory texts for Connect is challenging, mainly due to a combination of students not having much, if any, background knowledge about the SDGs and there being a wide ability range. Furthermore, as time is limited, we need to be purposeful in helping students to identify an SDG, and then a focus within that SDG, to investigate. This year, we developed a Theology Inquiry for Year 8, titled Who is the Messiah that the Jews were expecting? (LibGuide link), which worked very well. I am thinking, therefore, of starting with Jesus inaugurating his ministry by identifying himself with Isaiah’s prophetic text (Luke 4:18-19 referencing Isaiah 61:1-2, HCSB), which all students will be familiar with:

The Spirit of the Lord is on Me,/ because He has anointed Me/ to preach good news to the poor./ He has sent Me/ to proclaim freedom to the captives/ and recovery of sight to the blind,/ to set free the oppressed,/ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

This concern for the poor in the broadest sense of the word provides a strong link to Pope Francis’s second encyclical, Laudato si’ (Praise be to You): On care for our common home (24 May 2015), which exhorts us “to hear the cry of the poor and the earth” (emphasis added), and which took shape alongside the SDGs (29 September 2015).

I am also thinking of using a poem like William Blake’s London (1794), which, although not modernist (1890-1950), sheds a bleak light on the urbanisation accompanying the unfolding Industrial Revolution (1760-1840):

I wander through each chartered street,/ Near where the chartered Thames does flow,/ A mark in every face I meet,/ Marks of weakness, marks of woe.// In every cry of every man,/ In every infant’s cry of fear,/ In every voice, in every ban,/ The mind-forged manacles I hear:// How the chimney-sweeper’s cry/ Every blackening church appals,/ And the hapless soldier’s sigh/ Runs in blood down palace-walls.// But most, through midnight streets I hear/ How the youthful harlot’s curse/ Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,/ And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.

Some work for me still to do here, and I will reach out to my colleagues in English for suggestions.

More to follow.