Inquiry Teaching and Learning

CI 407 ITL/ LIS 450 ITL

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This course explores the creation of classrooms in which students and teachers are actively engaged in making meaning through personal and collaborative inquiry. Issues will include integrating across traditional curricular areas, themes, projects, student-centered learning, and connections between the classroom and the social and natural worlds beyond the school. One major issue is the role for teachers as inquirers about their own and their student's learning. The course will also examine challenges to inquiry-based instruction, including those related to management, assessment, basic skills, cultural differences and assumptions, and the responses of parents, principals, and others.

In the course we will--
  1. Learn from readings and discussions about inquiry teaching and learning, including rationales, approaches, implementations, challenges, and dilemmas. We will discuss articles drawn from a diverse collection of readings, including descriptions of classrooms, analyses of student learning, theoretical analyses of inquiry, and critiques of these approaches. These articles are meant to be read and thought about within the context of our own inquiry projects.
  2. Reflect upon the process of inquiry from the learner's perspective. During class, we will engage in our own inquiries into topics beginning with an extended exploration of one topic. The purpose of this is not so much to accumulate a set of teaching activities or to suggest one subject matter emphasis of the course, but rather to provide a common experiential base and extended vehicle for our conversations about teaching and learning.
  3. Study the process of inquiry teaching through an individual or small group research project in a setting such as a school, university classroom, or after school program. We will focus on teaching and learning practice through the development, application, and study of inquiry-based approaches to teaching and learning. Part of the class time will be devoted to sharing what we're learning through the research projects and to discussions aimed at understanding what occurs in different learning settings.
  4. Learn different perspectives on inquiry from discussions with visiting experts.

Location:  4F Education (Science Lab)
Time: Tuesdays, 4:00-6:50 pm.
Credit:  1 unit
Prerequisites:  none listed
Instructors:  Bertram Bruce and T.A. Dean Grosshandler
UIUC Timetable Entry
 

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