Apocalypse Theories Post 9

It has been a long time since the last post and this Thursday is the big day. Students have been working pretty hard and it has been interesting to see which groups have survived and which haven't; also which ones have used presentation to delay in-depth research. I can totally relate to them doing this, but in the end an inquiry has to result in a high quality product.

Inquiry is a disposition, an attitude towards knowledge and I think that everyone, even if what they produced is not that complex, will be able to do some really good critical reflection on themselves after the exhibition. Here is a quote that I have often thought of for this inquiry:

"A phenomenon will persist until the effort required to maintain it exceeds the effort required to revise it" (Davis, Luce and Sumara, p.108)

This is an idea central to constructivism. I have especially noticed this with students' note-taking. I have given workshops on how to do this and explained that if their research is to be complex they will have needed to read and noted potentially useful information from many sources, as they search and revise their inquiry question and the only realistic way to do this is to take good notes. Very few students actually believe me. If this quote is to be taken seriously the teacher's job is to create the conditions whereby the effort to maintain this anti-note-taking mindset is too much. Perhaps for some of them this assignment has helped them get to that place, but this is the only way students learn. It has been interesting to observe students continually updating and "construing" (the better translation from the French word construct") their understandings of the world. It took one student 15 weeks to admit he couldn't really do research. That is a valuable 15 weeks if you ask me. Some people never arrive at that conclusion. If they do it before year 11 more's the better.

The student's last inquiry was done with booklets with 6 inquiry steps. This was a useful exercise in many ways and the language of the steps has also helped students with this inquiry. But if students can only do inquiry if we provide them with booklets they haven't actually learnt anything significant. The school's quided inquiry process is for many students very useful but if they don't learn that inquiry is an attitude, an orientation towards knowledge, they haven't learnt anything significant at all.

Many students I think are starting to realise this; as the quote suggests about learning, they are realizing that their preconceived ideas about "research" don't really work and they could do with updating. That has probably been the highlight of this whole exercise. Piaget was on to it.

If we were to do it again I would need to think how I could better incorporate a central idea about society. I have struggled to work out how to have a really strong inquiry running alongside a really strong social studies curriculum that is based on an issue that students have participated in developing. This last thought will be the topic of the last blog.