Inquiry Model and Discipline Re-Integration

For me there is no learning without the inquiry model. Period. I believe this fervently as both a permanent student and a former business woman. If we do not ask questions we do not have a vested interest in information. The questioning process is the gateway to engagement. Moreover, if the teacher and student ask the questions together and the teacher also learns from the inquiry, the students will be likely to be more engaged. As a team-leader for many years in the workplace, I found that the more the team and I discovered new solutions together, the better the quality of the work and the esprit de corps.

Frankly, I found many of the charts and pictorial displays of the inquiry model rather distracting. That said, the theory of "habits of mind" resonates loudly for me. The recognition of "ground rules" is also quite useful and validating and affirming varied approaches to information gathering and analysis. Moreover, this construct provides the basis for the effective re-integration of compartmentalized educational disciplines.

Accordingly, I find the four components to habits of mind useful and essential to effect the interdisciplinary thinking that is so acutely and sadly missing from public education:

1. Inference questions: What can content tell us?
2. Interpretation questions: If we expand our thinking about content in larger conceptual frameworks, what themes can we recognize?
3. Transfer questions: If we then look at the content and prospective themes in broader context, what can we hypothesize about their generality or application?
4. Questions about hypotheses: How do we call upon nurtured and incorporated habits of mind to organize, interrelate and communicate the information we research to prove or disprove our hypotheses?

Inquiry is iterative and builds upon prior knowledge and experience. In a world where apprenticeships are rare, inquiry can be a proxy for experiencing cause and effect and a driver of higher order critical thinking.

Importantly, in the process of designing the question the search for the right answers is born. In any inquiry, even as seemingly mundane as "When did the French Revolution end?" the process to the answer is in clearly defining the desired outcome, or success metric of the answer.

For example, there are several dates that might be proffered as the end of the Revolution: the end of the Reign of Terror, the execution of Robespierre, the ascension of Napoleon to First Consul. But these are what Dewey would have called "dead facts." Dates are nothing more than points on a timeline and memorizing them without inference, interpretation, transfer and hypothesis is an empty learning process.

By contrast, we might ask ourselves what we believe signified the end so that we can draw inferences from the content: was it restoration of public order? Was it restoration of aristocracy? Was it the rise of Napoleon? Was it war with Europe? Each of these content points provides us with different inference cues and thus questions for further interpretation, contextual implications and hypotheses for what occurred in France, Europe and what we might learn about human behavior.

Importantly, there is ample opportunity for this process of defining the answer to incorporate currently segregated disciplines. What does the art of Jean Jacques David tell us about the emotional impulses of this period? What does the fascination with Greek and Roman classics mean in a country where the Catholicism is the official state religion with all of the economic and political power this entails? How did Napoleon revolutionize warfare? Was Napoleon a despicable tyrant like Hitler? How do we assess the contributions of Napoleon to world and historical knowledge such as finding the Rosetta Stone?

Napoleon referred to the necessity of religion to "inoculate" the populace to maintain social inequity; the rewards for the poor came in the afterlife. How does religion over the course of human history become a political tool for maintaining social hierarchy whether it is the secondary status of women in most orthodoxies or the evangelical chauvinism that leads to chronic conflict in human history?

And so on. The opportunity to frame an event through defining what we wish to learn about it and asking the questions that will get us there can assist students to become lifelong learners, students of their own curiosity.

We see how religion, sociology, philosophy, art history, architecture, history, science and technology all interact, interrelate and organize to provide us with a more satisfying view into how our contemporary society connects to the past.

I found a fabulous webcast that would assist in inquiry learning and connect disciplines and timelines. It is a webcast on propaganda and it is highly engaging and very versatile.

Address as follows: http://gozips.uakron.edu/~jat28/hypermedia/final/index.htm