IASL 2023 | Recovering the Educational Promise of Inquiry

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Jenny and I will be presenting an extended workshop at the 51st Annual IASL Conference and the 26th International Forum on Research in School Librarianship in Rome (17-21 July).

The workshop was on Monday 17 July and the presentation slides may be downloaded from here.

I include the workshop descriptions below:

Title

Recovering the Educational Promise of Inquiry

Short Description

Building resistance to four tendencies that sap inquiry of its educational potency through a practical exploration of a UK Year 6 (US Grade 5) interdisciplinary Signature Work STREAM inquiry that integrates work in Art & Design, English, ICT, Library, Maths and Science.

Programme Description

Neil Postman (1969, 1979, 1996) claimed that of all the survival strategies that education has to offer, none is more potent than the inquiry environment, and identified tendencies that sap inquiry of its educational potency. These tendencies are: (1) to divorce inquiry as a dynamic process and skills from learning important content; (2) to reduce inquiry to a mechanical process by divorcing it from a spirit of wonder and puzzlement; (3) to divorce inquiry from both a spirit of wonder and puzzlement and a dynamic process, and so reduce it to a thoughtless fact-finding activity; (4) to “engineer learning” through ever-more technical teaching methods based on ‘hard evidence’ from the field of cognitive science.

Schools must resist the four tendencies identified above, and integral to this resistance should be the school librarian.(*) We will explore this practically through a UK Year 6 (US Grade 5) interdisciplinary Signature Work inquiry that integrates curricular work in Science with curricular work in Art & Design, English, ICT, Library and Maths. Because inquiry is a process of building knowledge and understanding of the world from information, the majority of which exists in recorded form, inquiry is heavily dependent on reading in its broadest possible sense. Reading for learning, which includes non-fiction and fiction, is, therefore, timetabled in English lessons. Furthermore, reflective writing is an essential feature of a Signature Work inquiry, so students are required to submit a written report of their practical investigation in Science and their work in other subjects, which is also timetabled in English lessons. Thoughtful reading and writing are, therefore, a distinguishing feature of the Signature Work, which makes it authentically a STREAM inquiry (Science + Technology + Reading and wRiting + Engineering + Arts + Maths).

 (*) Foundational building blocks of our resistance to these tendencies include the IFLA School Library Guidelines (2015) and the work of Barbara Stripling, specifically, Empowering Students to Inquire in a Digital Environment (2017).

Long Description

In Teaching as a Subversive Activity, first published in 1969, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner asserted that “of all the ‘survival strategies’ education has to offer, none is more potent or in greater need of explication than the ‘inquiry environment'” (1971, p. 36). More than 50 years later, little has changed, and recovering the educational promise of inquiry requires some understanding of why.

Postman himself sheds some light on this. In Teaching as a Conserving Activity, first published in 1979, which revisits some of the ideas from Teaching as a Subversive Activity, he identifies two reasons for the dampening of his enthusiasm towards inquiry: the first is the tendency to divorce inquiry as a dynamic process and skills from learning important content; the second is the tendency to reduce inquiry to a mechanical process by divorcing it from a spirit of wonder and puzzlement (p. 214). To this we add a third, which is the tendency to divorce inquiry from both a spirit of wonder and puzzlement and a dynamic process, thereby reducing it to a thoughtless fact-finding activity.

This bad practice has sapped inquiry of its potency.

At the same time, Postman, writing in The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, first published in 1995, already observed a troubling tendency away from finding compelling metaphysical reasons for learning – a journey jointly undertaken by teacher and student – to “the engineering of learning” through ever-more technical teaching methods based on ‘hard evidence’ from the field of cognitive science (1996, pp. 26-27).

This questionable practice has gained in potency.

Perversely, bad practice and questionable practice have combined to create an even greater need for explication of inquiry while making such explication significantly more difficult, and not just in the US.

Postman, it must be noted, makes no mention above of school librarians, unless he views them as teachers and includes them when talking about teachers. This is odd, because as Daniel Callison (2015) points out, “the progression to student-centered, inquiry-based learning through school library programs was clearly underway more than forty years ago” (p. 3), and can be traced back to 1960 (p. 213). This is also unfortunate, because school librarians are key to recovering the educational promise of inquiry, and a “‘disconnect’ between school librarianship and the larger education community” persists, as Keith Curry Lance and Debra Kachel observe (Pun, 2021), with disastrous consequences – for school librarians, our classroom-based colleagues, our students, and, ultimately, the democratic fabric of society.

Against this backdrop, we propose the following:

• To establish that the very real and complex existential threat confronting us is epistemological in nature – a breakdown in the knowledge-building process, which is, in fact, the inquiry process. We will do this with reference to the Constitution of Knowledge, which is the “epistemic operating system” of liberal democracy (Rauch, 2021, p. 15). Consequently, the survival strategy that we most need, and that school must provide – after school is too late – is an inquiry environment that actually produces engaged students who are well equipped to join in the work of the global reality-based “community of error-seeking inquirers” (Rauch, 2021, p. 15), and upon which the Constitution of Knowledge depends.
• In order to do so, schools must resist the four tendencies identified above, and integral to this resistance should be the school librarian.* We will explore this practically through a UK Year 6 (US Grade 5) interdisciplinary Signature Work inquiry that integrates curricular work in Science with curricular work in Art & Design, English, ICT, Library and Maths. Because inquiry is a process of building knowledge and understanding of the world from information, the majority of which exists in recorded form, inquiry is heavily dependent on reading in its broadest possible sense. Reading for learning, which includes non-fiction and fiction, is, therefore, timetabled in English lessons. Furthermore, reflective writing is an essential feature of a Signature Work inquiry, so students are required to submit a written report of their practical investigation in Science and their work in other subjects, which is also timetabled in English lessons. Thoughtful reading and writing are, therefore, a distinguishing feature of the Signature Work, which makes it authentically a STREAM project (Science + Technology + Reading and wRiting + Engineering + Arts + Maths).

*Foundational building blocks of our resistance to these tendencies include the IFLA School Library Guidelines (2015) and the work of Barbara Stripling, specifically, Empowering Students to Inquire in a Digital Environment (2017).

Bibliography

• Callison, D. (2015). The Evolution of Inquiry: Controlled, Guided, Modeled, and Free. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited.
• IFLA. (2015). IFLA School Library Guidelines. The Hague: IFLA. Retrieved March 4, 2023, from https://repository.ifla.org/handle/123456789/58
• Postman, N. (1996). The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York, NY: Random House.
• Postman, N. (1979). Teaching as a Conserving Activity. New York, NY: Delta.
• Postman, N., & Weingartner, C. (1971). Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
• Pun, R. (2021, June 7). An Interview with Debra E. Kachel and Keith Curry Lance on the IMLS Project, “SLIDE: School Librarian Investigation: Decline or Evolution?”. Retrieved October 11, 2021, from IFLA CPDWL Blog: https://blogs.ifla.org/cpdwl/2021/06/07/an-interview-with-debra-e-kachel-and-keith-curry-lance-on-the-imls-project-related-to-slide-school-librarian-investigation-decline-or-evolution/
• Rauch, J. (2021). The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
• Stripling, B. K. (2017). Empowering Students to Inquire in a Digital Environment. In S. W. Alman (Ed.), School Librarianship: Past, Present, and Future (pp. 51-63). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

 

UPDATE: The presentation slides may be accessed here.

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