“Place is or can be a co-teacher”– (Judson, 2018, p. 5)
Inquiry, “the act of inquiring or of seeking information by questioning; interrogation” (Dictionary.com, 2020). This project was an event of enlightenment for me where I got the breakthrough in my teaching career. I could assess my capabilities and skills, polish those, and welcome a new approach to make learning more meaningful. Previously I was naïve in Inquiry-based approach, and inquiry as a teaching approach was entirely new term for me. However, when I delved deeper, I found its beauty. I chose this course with the view that it would have something to do with curriculum designing or reform, but when I read the guidelines and outline, I become more curious about knowing it and experiencing it. In the beginning, the thought of creating lesson plans, being inexperienced in the BC curriculum, sacred me. However, somewhere I knew it would be a great opportunity to get exposure and experiment with, challenge my self, test my abilities (self-discoveries) whether I can pursue the profession of teaching here, in Canada as well. The journey was quite bumpy.
Challenges and successes
This project challenged me to entirely reimagine the way of how I can teach. It helped me to see inter-links between various curricular contents and surroundings, which we usually identify but somewhere get scared to highlight those either because of system, time or sometimes considering the vulnerability of young minds. It woke me up and pushed me to go beyond books and laboratory experiments especially in the context of science (Judson, 2018). However, this situation was entirely virtual, and I missed the students a lot. I can imagine its wideness, scope, and how it can benefit the learners by inculcating a sense of place and community, which would help them in reimagining their relationships with the world (Judson, 2018). I realized the significance of making an emotional connection with the topic to make it alive, personally relevant, and meaningful. If students are engaged imaginatively and emotionally then learning becomes more efficient and effective, interesting, and pleasurable for all (Egan, & Judson, 2015). Furthermore, understanding of the cognitive tools such as storytelling, mapmaking, and using binary opposites, help in comprehending how teaching practice can be made more imaginatively engaging for students by knowing about how human cognition gradually emerge and develop to get a better grasp on how to help people learn (Egan, & Judson, 2015). Through the concept of a nature walk with the purpose of instilling a sense of place, I realized how places enrich sense-making abilities and transform personalities (Judson, 2018).
Questions about the process
How can students be restricted/disciplined to be in the context of subject matter for which inquiry is designed when they are encouraged to think deeply, engage emotionally, and imaginatively through a sense of place? Would not it be against the inquiry process? What if a student finds himself more into the history of plants instead of knowing scientific knowledge of the chemical process, would the student be forced back to be in the context or how these situations can be tackled? I was imagining several such possibilities that can happen when content is tried to make interdisciplinary especially when dealing with the young curious brains who just need little push to delve deeper into what they are interested in. As John Dewey advises “our mission is to teach everything that anyone is interested in learning.” Moreover, can two birds be killed with a stone, in other words, can inclusivity and inquiry go hand in hand considering differences in how learners learn to like, their pace, interest, skills, and attitudes, and how their backgrounds and social cultures affect the inquiry and learning process?
Reflect on the inquiry process.
Today’s time demands a change in the current education system by reflecting on the means especially when it comes to subjects like science which are of utmost practical importance. This concern is not the new one, mentioned by Dewey decades ago, “Dewey’s plea all those years ago . . . should rekindle within us a desire to consider more thoughtfully the purposes for which we seek to educate the public about science. Recovering the civic goals of science education is long overdue—at least a century or so by my count (Dewey, 1910).” I would like to include more nature walks inspired and suggested by peers, I would like to spend more time on each lesson for comprehensive understanding and details, I would try to keep the elder in touch until the whole unit would be completed to support and guide the students. I would like to invite other schoolteachers from History, Social Studies, and Environmental Education to make it interdisciplinary from wider sense so that time spent on it could be worth it and utilized well to meet the aims. Matthew Arnold insisted that “the important thing, the indispensable thing in education, is to become acquainted with human life itself, its art, its literature, its politics, the fluctuations of its career” (As cited in Dewey, 1910).
Learning from the process
Science has usually been taught as an accumulation of ready-made material, fixed procedures to do experiments in laboratories, to which students are expected to be familiar and follow, not with the intention of thinking, an attitude of mind, to transform learner’s personalities as responsible and happy citizens (Dewey, 1910). Through this initiative, I found the complexity in the “Inquiry in science”, that it is not merely about asking questions and wondering. It is more about engaging emotionally and imaginatively to find all the possibilities of learning holistically. To make the content meaningful and memorable, it is very important to bring it to life for learners in the context of their hopes, fears, passions, or ingenuity (Egan, & Judson, 2015) and emphasis on method than the content can help in accomplishing this (Condon, & Wichowsky, 2018). Along with this, Walking based practices connect curriculum with real-life by altering the “context- location, form of attention, and the involvement of the students” of learning
“When you give yourself to places, they give you back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind and walking travels both terrains.”- Rebecca Solnit (n.d.; as cited in Attenborough, 2017).
I am just wondering how far an inquiry can go. Would it be able to restore the imbalance caused by the traditional way of education? Or would it also be outcasted or challenged after years by highlighting its flaws and replaced with something new and trendy? I just want to look on the other side of inquiry, I wish there could have been some light on its limitations and challenges. Moreover, I wonder, if we have such an informative and useful knowledge then why schools are still fixating on conceptual content, rarely changing their approach from the single-minded goal of conveying as many physical, biological, and chemical facts as possible, usually to increase standardized test scores (Rudolph, 2014, p. 1057)
Conclusion
Science education can help in the upliftment of the communities by establishing productive relationships with the cognitive tools of the learners and its social role in the contemporary world, in Dewey’s words (1910). It is very important to emphasize and choose the right method to achieve the objectives and aim in other words “focus on method over content” (Dewey, 1910). To make a distinction between science as a body of content knowledge and science as a method of inquiry is imperative to have comprehensive knowledge of how science generates reliable knowledge of the world (Rudolph, 2014). The developing familiarity with basic scientific concepts to the world can positively influence the decisions made by people in their daily lives, say, in deciding which appliance to buy or in selecting the best method to remove a stain from a blouse or jacket (Rudolph, 2014).