BOOK :: Inquiry-Based English Instruction

Subtitled, "Engaging Students in Life and Literature", by Richard Beach and Jamie Myers, 2001 Teacher's College, Columbia University. This book was lent to me by Julie Kalnin.

Chapter 2, incredible how relevant this text is to my work. How I wish I had cited portions of this in my Block Grant proposal for funding. It does reinvigorate my intuitive sense that what I am proposing and embarking upon is of the UTMOST relevance and validity. For example:

"We inquire into social worlds by examinging the tools of language and symbols that humans use to construct those worlds" (17)

"We can critique social worlds being realized and expand our possible relationships and identities by seeking different symbolic interactions (discourses) and social activities (practices). With such a sense of power, there is less chance for language, text, and activity to marginalize people, and a greater chance that a diversity of views will be considered as we, together, continually create and resolve our multiple social worlds." (17)

There are 6 Inquiry Strategies:

1. Immersing: Entering into the activities of a social world, experiencing the social world as a participant, or observing a social world.

2. Identifying, Defining concerns, issues, and dilemmas that arise in a social world, or from conflict across multiple social worlds.

3. Contextualizing: Explaining how the activities, symbols, and texts used in one or more social worlds produce the components of a social world--identities, roles, relationships, expectations, norms, beliefs, and values.

4. Representing: Using symbolic toools to create a text that represents a lived social world or resonds to a represented social world.

5. Critiquing: Analyzing how a representation of a social world privileges particular values and beliefs: analyzing how particular literacy practices within a social world promote certain meanings while marginalizing other possibilities.

6. Transforming: Revising one's meanings for the components of a social world, changing one's actions and words within a social world to construct more desirable identities, relationships, and values.

(pages17-18)

Research Techniques:
wondering
question asking
observing
note taking
interviewing
data analysis

"These inquiry strategies mutually support each other and revolve around various research technqiues--wondering, question asking, observing, note taking, interviewing, and data anaylsis. Although most inquiries begin with the strategy of immersing oneself in the social world of study, a student might identify a concern in the midst of actions attempting to transform a relationship with another person in a social world. Or a student attempting to contextualize a statement in terms of the values it promotes might decide she needs to immerse himself in that world for a longer period of time to better understand the common expectations and practices of the social world. While students may begin their projects with identifying and end with transforming a social world, they may also begin at other ponts in the circle, moving from any one strategy to another strategy. And the circle never stops. Once students have transformed a social world, they only encounter new issues, problems, conflicts, and tensions, requiring further inquiry." (18)

"The primary purpose of engaging in inquiry is...gain an understandingof how we construct or author the social worlds we inhabit. Students conduct inquiry projects about their own everyday experiences in social worlds as well as social worlds portrayed in literature or the media." (20)

>>About Hermeneutic Inquiry:

"1. [Hermeneutic inquiry] seeks to locate sites for inquiry that situate interpreters in the middle of the activities related to ome topic of mutal interest. Taht is, students select issues or topics in which they have access to participatns as they experience certain social worlds, including themselves.

2. Hermeneutic Inquiry seeks to situate all partcipant sin activities that allow the path of inquiry to be 'laid while walking'... This method depends on interpretations given to questions that 'present themselves' rather that questions which are predetermined. This suggestts the importance on continually formulating and reformulating questions, concerns, problems, issues, or "wonderings" during the process of studying a world. As students discover new ideas through observing and talking to people, they formulate new quesitons. They are therefore not locked into prematurely defined questions that may turn out to be irrelevant to their study. Moreover, they continue to generate new conerns, isssues, or dilemmas requireing further study.

3. Hermeneutic inquiry does not seek comfortable situation or solutions. Students also need to be willing to study difficult or controversial issues. And, in doing so, they need to e open to challenging the status quo." (20-21)

"As writers, drawers, readers, viewers, speakers, listeners, or photographer, we participate in social practices that use systems of signs such as language, music, or media to represent and communicate lived expereience in a social world." (22)