Early last summer I began getting professionally developed as a science educator. What I developed was an appreciation for the power of inquiry to stimulate thinking. In the spirit of becoming an inquirer, I began wondering what inquiry might look like in the context of reading instruction. I wondered what process skills for literacy might be called. The science process skills of observing, predicting, classifying, and measuring must have an analog where literacy is concerned.

I ran across a possible answer to my question about literacy process skills in an article by Jerome Harste in a textbook I had on my shelf, Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (1994, out of print). I can’t remember why I was looking in that book, but Harste’s chapter, “Curriculum as Literacy Conversations about Knowledge, Inquiry, and Morality” gave me an idea. A couple of weeks ago I wrote that I planned to explore a “reconceptualization of curriculum” with my students in the coming months. That wheel is turning.

Curriculum is normally organized around academic disciplines that are used as categories for the topics we’re expected to teach. Curricula serve to standardize what’s taught (and learned) to ensure common outcomes for students in school. Harste proposed that we reconsider our practice of using the disciplines (curricular subject areas) as a starting point for instruction. Besides the role they play as “bodies of knowledge” the disciplines also provide “ways of knowing” which serve as a lens that can limit what is knowable. If we allow students to seek answers to authentic questions, the outcomes of learning are undefined. Inquiry therefore promotes openness, divergence, and differences as opposed to sameness and uniformity. When conducted in an environment that allows personalized constructions of meaning and collaboration, inquiry supports “disciplined conversations” in which the disciplines provide perspective without narrowly defining the possibilities for learning. Now I wonder what it would look like if the “outcomes of learning are undefined?” It sounds….messy. But I also wonder, how is that any different than things are now, when kids don’t-won’t learn what is presented to them from The Curricular Canon? In that case, aren’t the actual “outcomes of learning” still undefined?

The process skills for reading Harste mentioned as possibilities:

  • Negotiation is both an internal cognitive process and a more social activity in which possible meanings are considered. It is the necessary deliberation that occurs before we reach consensus on any interpretation of a text.
  • Transmediation is the use of sign systems such as music, dance, drawing, drama, and language in order to interpret our experience of the world. The sign systems offer us different forms of self-expression, and they each allow different meanings to be made. They operate as metaphors that describe patterns of meaning we recognize. We tend to prefer linguistic sign systems in schools, but advocates for art and music education understand transmediation.
  • Transformation is the reformatting of what we know for our own purposes. It is the forming of connections between our experience and texts as we attempt to render our own meanings for specific audiences.

What this means for me is a shift in my activity as a teacher. The role of the teacher in an inquiry-oriented classroom is to

  1. Be an inquirer - a teacher-researcher stance toward educational practice is helpful.
  2. Support a learning/thinking culture - create a community of learners by encouraging collaboration.
  3. Be a listener/observer - take notes, pay attention to students individually.
  4. Pose questions - encourage students to reflect on what they are learning.
  5. Organize - gather resources you know will help students find what they’re looking for.

My students are presently working in a Reading/Writing workshop environment. They are making choices about what they read and write, reporting to one another and to me in dialog journals. Where I’m headed with this is to begin teaching them about research. We’ve started a unit of study on salmon, which is a topic that lends itself to both science and social studies since salmon is a resource for people throughout our state. I’ve set up a Drupal website for them to report on their activity and to publish their stories. I’ll post a link to that site once we get some content on it. My school district’s technology department is supportive of this effort, but they are a little bit delayed in their timeline for providing the infrastructure I require. I’m told that a server for projects like this is on order, and may soon be available. In the meantime, I’ve set the website up on another subdomain next to Borderland. I am fortunate to work in a school community that respects the professionalism of teachers and encourages us to follow our instincts.

I don’t claim to know exactly where I’m going with this. I do know that math, being a sign system in and of itself, will require it’s own dedicated instructional time. In order to prevent this project from getting chaotic, we’ll approach it, initially at least, in a guided inquiry fashion. A guided inquiry is one in which the students are not given free reign, but rather are constrained and assisted in the formulation of the questions they ask.

Finally, I agree with Jerome Harste that the knowledge most worth teaching within an inquiry framework might well be the process of inquiry itself.

Source:
Harste, J. C. (1994). Literacy as Curricular Conversations about Knowledge, Inquiry, and Morality. In S. Harry(Eds.), Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading (pp. 1220-1242). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.