The Inquiry Block

(B. Course Description)

The Year Long Project is an experiment in teacher education. After two years we are continuing to develop and extend the basic ideas that have already made it very effective at helping students become successful teachers. Three of its characteristics represent significant departures from the traditional teacher preparation programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

First, it is implemented as a collaborative effort between public schools in Urbana and Champaign and the UIUC. Most of the classes are held in the Flossie Wiley Public School in Urbana. Public school teachers work together with university faculty on instructional teams to share theoretical perspectives, establish goals, and design learning activities. The structure of the project allows all participants to confront the all-too-familiar separation of theory and practice. It also allows us to draw on diverse perspectives, experiences, and knowledge about teaching and learning.

Second, course work is linked closely to public school teaching practice. Students in the project are in the classroom 15+ hours a week while taking their own teacher preparation courses. During the last 10 weeks of the year the classroom teaching grows to 30 hours a week. Students can try out new ideas in the classroom and integrate what they see and do in the classroom with their course work. They bring videotapes of their own teaching into their courses to get feedback, discuss problems, and share what they learn about teaching with other prospective teachers.

Third, the course work integrates what had been 7 methods and curriculum courses into 3 blocks, called "Language & Literacy", "Curriculum & Instruction", and "Inquiry". Even these blocks are integrated through coordinated planning and activities. The coordination makes it much easier to see how literature can be used to support, stimulate, and extend science learning, or how mathematics can be used to address problems in social studies.

As the Year Long Project has developed over the past two years, the idea of "community" has become central. Students learn through their participation in a community comprising other prospective teachers, as well as the cooperating teachers and the instructional team. The close contact engendered through taking the same courses, working in the same schools, observing each other’s teaching, and participating as a group in an intense project leads to mutual support in learning. At the same time, UIUC and public-school faculty have discovered that they too grow through the close, cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration called for by the project.

The Inquiry Block replaces what had been separate methods course in mathematics (C&I 330), science (C&I 340), and social studies (C&I 345). The integration of mathematics with science and social studies is a new idea this year that we hope will make it easier to integrate across subject areas. Another new feature of the course is the inclusion of new technologies and media. We will use these in the course and learn about their role in teaching across all subject areas. We are also working to integrate the new course with the other blocks.

We see inquiry as intrinsic to all forms of learning. Thus, in addition to supporting an inquiry approach to teaching and learning in mathematics, science, and social studies, we will explore the idea of an inquiry approach across the curriculum.

The individual and society. All learning begins with the learner. What children know and what they want to learn are not just constraints on what can be taught; they are the very foundation for learning. Dewey’s description of the four primary interests of the child are still appropriate starting points: "the interest in conversation, or communication; in inquiry, or finding out things; in making things, or construction; and in artistic expression--we may say they are the natural resources, the uninvested capital, upon the exercise of which depends the active growth of the child" (Dewey, 1915, p. 47).

But, as Dewey recognized, schooling is not just about the individual. It is the coming together of the child’s interests with those of the society. The disciplines we study in school represent centuries of collective thought as well as the interests of the larger community in maintaining itself by communicating its knowledge and values to the next generation. Schooling also represents the intersection of a complex set of social and political forces--the needs of the workplace, democratic as well as authoritarian values, and the need to protect as well as manage children.

Through the interplays of the individual and the community, schooling and society, desires for liberation and desires for control, needs for knowledge and needs for skills, humanistic and scientific world views, and more, we develop curricula. Represented by textbooks, with knowledge neatly compartmentalized and questions at the end of each chapter, there is often little direct evidence of the complex forces that shaped their creation.

Engaging in inquiry. One important way to view any school subject, whether it’s "phonics", "spelling", "literature", "addition", "probability", "the environment", "biology", "houses around the world", "Columbus", or "the Phoenicians", is as a domain for inquiry. Each subject is thus a realm to explore, to conjecture about, to debate, or to understand. Of course, different areas have their own distinctive modes and phenomena of investigation. For example, mathematics, as mathematicians know it, is the science of patterns. The study of mathematics is the creation of or the discovery of beautiful relationships among numbers, structures, shapes, transformations, and other mathematical objects.

Being engaged in inquiry within some domain means that there is neither a pre-determined set of requisite knowledge and skills, nor a pre-defined end point to learning. Instead, it means that inquirers are constructing knowledge based on what they know already, what questions they are pursuing, and what emerges through investigation and interaction with others. This view contrasts sharply with the practice of dividing a subject into a list of simplified facts and delivering them efficiently to the learner (the transmitting knowledge approach).

Another important way to view any school subject is as a thinking tool or resource that can be applied in other areas of inquiry, or to practical problems of everyday life. Starting from the inquiry view in no way precludes developing skill in using new tools. To the contrary, by restoring a sense of "aboutness", it can contextualize the learning of otherwise isolated and meaningless skills. Consider again the case of mathematics. It is a powerful tool that we all can use to learn in other subject areas, to solve problems, to communicate with others, and to enrich our lives.

Just as inquiry within a domain is antithetical to the idea of depositing facts in the learner’s head, developing new resources for thinking cannot be done by the simple accumulation of isolated skills. If the emphasis is on decontextualized skills, such as learning to read simply for the sake of reading, to write without a sense of audience and purpose, to spell isolated words, to add columns of numbers, to follow a recipe for a science demonstration, and so on, students do not develop new resources or tools for learning, communicating, and problem solving. The knowledge one gains through inquiry is the basis for further inquiry. Thus, these two views of the curriculum complement, rather than compete, with each other.

(And, true inquiry requires that the inquiry approach to teaching must itself be subject to critical analysis. It is unlikely that you will agree with everything in all the course textbooks or everything that is said in class. What’s important is not to absorb everything that is said or to accept any one view, but to listen carefully to many diverse views, connect theory with practice, and use the ideas you hear as resources to refine your own theories of inquiry, teaching, and learning.)

Becoming a teacher. No course or set of courses, no matter how well constructed or integrated with actual teaching can fully prepare anyone for all the challenges of teaching. And the Year Long Project is no exception. But it is possible to discover how what you already know can be the basis for a lifelong process of learning and critical reflection. The best teachers are characterized more by their continuing commitment to learning about children, teaching, and the world around them, than by any method or body of knowledge. Some of the questions we will begin to explore within the inquiry block are these:

• What are the most important aspects of the process of inquiry?

• How is inquiry in different domains similar or different?

• What is mathematics (or science, or social studies)?

• How can children learn to integrate quantitative and qualitative understandings of the world?

• How do ideas such as multiculturalism, whole language, inquiry teaching, discovery learning, concept development, hands-on learning, cooperative learning groups, communication, apprenticeship, and others inform our theories of teaching and learning?

• How can those ideas be realized in actual classrooms?

• How can classroom activities start with the child and still respond to other educational demands and constraints?

• How can the classroom become a place where diverse perspectives are valued and understood?

• How can the classroom become a place in which children develop important human values as well as knowledge?

• How can a teacher create the most successful environment for learning?

Questions such as these have no easy answers. And there are other important questions, as well. You may have different ones already. A year from now you will be responsible for the learning and development of a class of young people. What do you feel is most important for you to know to be a good teacher?

We intend for the course to be guided by what you want to learn. Your questions will be critical to the course’s success. Perhaps your most important responsibility now as a student is to imagine yourself as a teacher with 30 kids and to ask yourself "What do I wish I had learned more about during that Year Long Project?"