Bibliography for inquiry-based learning

From GSLISWiki

Inquiry Kit Table of Contents

1. Inquiry kit (introduction)
2. Inquiry Interest (IBL)
3. The Story of Our Inquiry (IBL)
4. The Moon (IBL)
5. Bibliography for inquiry-based learning

American Council of Learned Societies' Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences. “Draft Report.” http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/acls-ci-public.pdf

Description and Summary This is a sixty-four page document outlining a strategy for computing in the humanities and social sciences. Its principal author is John Unsworth, Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Illinois. While it might seem that the document has little to do with inquiry-based learning, or with teaching and learning more generally, I hope to explain why this report (if its hopes are realized) has much to do with the future shape of those fields concerned with understanding human culture both historically and in the present, and much to do with how students at all age levels, and the general public, will someday come to learn about history, anthropology, political theory, the social sciences, and much more. The report features an introduction and three chapters, and I’ll summarize each of these chunks in turn.

More Gardner Rogers

Bizar, M. & Daniels H. (1998) Methods that Matter: Six Structures for Best Practice Classrooms. Maine: Stenhouse Publishers Methods that Matter describes practical ways of organizing time, space, materials, students, teachers, and activities for inquiry based learning activities in the classroom. Bizar and Daniel are both former public school teachers and currently teach at the Center for City Schools of National-Louis University in Chicago. Illustrated by stories from various classroom experiences and grade levels, the book describes activities that address practical advice for developing inquiry based learning through six central themes including: 1. Interdisciplinary inquiries – activities co-planned between students and teachers that address themes across disciplines. 2. Learning through small group activities – students work with teams and partners to create group investigations. Group projects are described as a way to decentralize the classroom and increase knowledge through peer interactions. 3. Representing learning through a variety of media – art and writing is used for investigating and applying information. 4. The role of teachers and students in classroom workshops – the teacher is seen as coach, guiding students in their learning. 5. Authentic experiences – classroom learning is connected to real life situations. Inquiry is developed around real life situations that are important to students’ lives. 6. Reflective Assessment – suggests alternative ways of assessing student knowledge during inquiry based learning activities. It suggests ways to address student growth including allowing students to set their own goals. Gigi Yu

Burnaford, G, Aprill, A., & Weiss, C. (2001). Renaissance in the classroom: arts integration and meaningful learning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Renaissance in the classroom is of primary interest to K-12 classroom teachers, arts specialists, and visiting artists who work with young people in schools or community arts organizations and is also highly relevant and useful for policymakers, arts partnerships, administrators, and parents. This book investigates the possibilities for learning and growth when artists and arts educators come into a classroom and work with teachers to engage students in drama, dance, visual art, music, and media arts through inquiry methods. Classroom examples are given that bridge separate curricular areas through inquiring “big ideas” which address issues across disciplines. Big ideas are explored through fat questions engaging students in deeper inquiry and more reflective learning experiences. Another important point for creating learning is investigated through students’ own questions. Examples are given that suggest the value of students learning to ask their own questions as frameworks for inquiry and as an organizing principle for learning experiences. KWL charts are given as one way to examine what students want to know and what they already know. Other suggestions such as mapping provide a tool for teachers, students, and artists to map their learning experiences. Gigi Yu

Corrin, L. (Ed.). (1994). Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson. Baltimore: The Contemporary

This collection contains images of a museum exhibit, reflective essays, recorded conversations among the docents of the exhibit, and museum visitors’ responses. The museum exhibit, installed by artist Fred Wilson, was born out of a collaboration between the Maryland Historic Society and The Contemporary; it was prompted by both museums’ questions: What am I to this community? What stories have I told and failed to tell through the layout of my pieces? Whose views am I representing or failing to represent? What role do visitors have in the history portrayed in these exhibits? Through discovering artifacts never revealed before (such as whipping posts and shackles), and juxtaposing them with other museum pieces, Wilson commented on the history of museum practices, and organized a museum setting in which visitors could challenge their prior notions about Maryland’s past, and explore newly-posed narratives. Doriet

'Dennis, Nancy'Using inquiry methods to foster information literacy partnerships Reference Services Review Volume 29, Number 2, 2001, 122-131 Retrieved from http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/ViewContentServlet?Filename=Published/EmeraldFullTextArticle/Pdf/2400290205.pdf on February 20, 2006.

This article talks about how librarians can incorporate inquiry into their services in both school libraries and academic libraries. The article calls for academic librarians to view their instructional responsibilities in a new light: “We must shift the focus from librarians postulating what students need to know to librarians supporting students creating their own paths toward information literacy” (127). This article was especially interesting to me because the author, an academic librarian, highlights an inquiry unit she led in a Women’s Studies course. By Amelia Bowen

Donnan, C. (1988) Following Our Forebears’ Footsteps: From Expedition to Understanding. V. Rogers, A.D. Roberts & T.P. Weinland (Eds.). Teaching Social Studies: Portraits from the Classroom (Bulletin No. 82) Washington, DC: National Council for the Social Studies.

This is an account of a third grade class’s first-hand learning and understanding of their town’s historical personalities, beliefs, cultural practices, and decision-making processes. Exploring historic North Andover, MA - the town in which they lived, Donnan’s students physically entered history by reenacting scenes, formulating maps, holding meetings, attending to architecture patterns, and discussing issues of the time as their designated historical characters would. Their trips to a graveyard generated observations about the number of children who had died in the community; their expedition to the Johnson Cottage revealed low ceilings and short beds - encounters that would fuel further inquiries into what it was like to live in the 1640's. Describing such expeditions and the observations and questions they generated among her students, Donnan portrays an active and reflective experience of research and investigation that extends beyond the classroom. Doriet

Duckworth, Eleanor (1987). “The having of wonderful ideas” and other essays on teaching and learning. Teachers College Press: New York.

Eleanor Duckworth, who has been a student and colleague of Jean Piaget, brings his theory into a useful resource to understand learning and teaching. Or more appropriately, she urges teachers to become a Piaget in the effort to understand children and learning. One of several essays in this book, The having of wonderful ideas, illustrates how the author’s experiences with children led her to believe “the having of wonderful ideas is … the essence of intellectual development (pp.1).” Based on this belief, she argues that teachers should endeavor to provide environments for wonderful ideas to thrive in classroom. Throughout the book, the author describes many teachers try to figure out student’s ideas and become an inquirer themselves. While describing those efforts, Duckworth addresses various issues around implementing inquiry in school settings. (by Mihye)

The Edible Schoolyard http://www.edibleschoolyard.org/homepage.html

I came across this site after reading an op-ed piece in the 02/24/06 edition of the New York Times written by Alice Waters, who founded a program in conjunction with the Martin Luther King Junior Middle School in Berkeley, California. Waters’ article argued that when something like 9 million children over the age of 6 are obese, and when school lunches principally teach that food should be cheap, fast, and easy (as well as un-nutritious), “[i]t’s time for students to start getting credit for eating a good lunch.”

As the web site shows, children learn how to eat well—and a good deal more—by raising their own gardens in a one-acre plot. They learn about plant life, about the soil and sunlight, about harvesting, about cultural values (since children from different ethnic backgrounds learn different food preferences), about cooking, and about responsible growing practices aligned with ecological principles and environmental needs.

At the 2/22 meeting of the Inquiry Lunch, we found ourselves talking about Dewey’s model school, where sheep were a central part of the curriculum; we asked ourselves what Dewey would do now, in 2006. The Edible Schoolyard provides a plausible answer to our question.

Gardner Rogers February 24, 2006

Gallas, Karen (1998) “Sometimes I can be anything”: Power, gender, and identity in a primary classroom. Teachers College Press: New York.

Providing productive learning environments should start from understanding student’s experiences: not only intellectual side, but social, emotional, behavioral sides. While Duckworth’s book, The having of wonderful ideas, focuses on teacher’s understanding of student’s intellectual side – student’s making sense of material world, this book focuses on student’s social identity side – student’s making sense of social world and their positions. As a teacher researcher, Gallas carefully describes her classroom interactions – Bad Boys’ exercise of their physical, intellectual power over others; a boy who is too proud to take any risks; a beautiful girl who uses silence as a cover for embarrassment or fear of failure. With charming stories of her students, the author shows how the students constructed the social world in classroom and how the social dynamics interacts with what each student learns and values. (by Mihye)

IDEALS (Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship).

Perhaps inquiry favors process over product, the act of inquiring over the act of publishing. If that’s true (and I don’t think it’s true in all cases), my choice of this digital depository may seem eccentric. But I think that IDEALS is very much a part of inquiry-related thinking, or at least it can be, and I want in this entry to explain why.

IDEALS aims to become a digital repository holding the documents of scholarship, learning, and teaching in an archive to be preserved into the foreseeable future. It guarantees, among other things, that it will convert its holdings into the technological formats of the future—which means that document files, image files, sound files, video files, and all the rest will be preserved even as the software with which they were created becomes antiquated.

This is a Research-One university, so the original emphasis has been placed on academic work. Conversations with Sarah Shreeves and others at IDEALS suggests that the process of convincing faculty to submit their work to this repository has been slow going and hard work. To no small extent, this project imagines an ideal of sharing information that contradicts the current model of publication, and thereby confronts a cultural problem named and addressed by the American Council of Learned Societies' Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences (see the first entry above).

But IDEALS also offers storage of student work, and in my work as program coordinator for the Ethnography of the University (EOTU) initiative I am converting student work that was originally posted on Inquiry and iLabs pages to PDF documents, and then depositing these documents in IDEALS, where EOTU is represented (rightly, I think) as a community.

My hope, and my reason for including IDEALS in this bibliography, rests on the belief that as people read samples of student inquiry (and they will be reading these samples ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred years from now, if all goes well), they will perceive not only how students at the beginning of this millennium thought, saw, wrote, and felt, but also how inquiry itself acts as a process. Our students never reach final answers (nor are they expected to); instead, they take the knowledge-making process just a little further as they ask questions about the university where they receive their education. They thereby model the process of inquiry itself.

Gardner Rogers

Paley, Vivian G. (1986). On listening to what the children say. Harvard Educational Review, 56(2), 122-131.

This article illustrates how Vivian Paley came to change her understanding of teaching: from finding the right answers from children to becoming curious of children’s thinking or becoming a kid watcher (like a bird watcher). As the author tells happenings in her kindergarten class, the readers realize students’ ideas of the world often are quite different from adults’. Instead of forcing her own view, the author listened with respect, persistency, and curiosity to what children had to say. She also confessed sometimes her intervention to guide students was not successful. Yet, she argues a continuous try of resolving confusion is a necessary step to lead understanding. (by Mihye)

Project Zero, Cambridgeport School, Cambridgeport Children’s Center, Ezra H. Baker School, John Simpkins School (2003). Making teaching visible: documenting individual and group learning as professional development. Cambridge, MA: Project Zero Harvard Graduate School of Education.Making Teaching Visible:

Documenting Individual and Group Learning as Professional Development records teachers as they learn to document the learning process during project activities in their classrooms. Teachers learned to develop inquiry into their own practice and used documentation practices to record the learning that occurred among students. Based on stories of how teachers pursued their own questions about their practice and their students’ learning processes, the role of documentation is analyzed in supporting professional development. During these endeavors, teachers were recorded as active learners. They identified their own questions, gathered their own evidence, and worked collaboratively with other teachers in answering their own questions. Five features of documentation clarify how inquiry processes promote teacher learning: 1) Documentation practices involved specific questions that guided the knowledge building process 2) Documentation involves collectively analyzing and interpreting data; it is strengthened by multiple perspectives 3) documentation takes place with multiple forms including photography, video recordings, drawings, journals, etc. 4) Documentation makes learning visible for other teachers, parents, students and the education community 5) Documentation shapes the design of future learning contexts. Gigi Yu

An Integrated Approach to Implementing Collaborative Inquiry in the Classroom Daniel D. Suthers, Eva Erdosne Toth, and Arlene Weiner University of Pittsburgh 
Learning Research and Development Center Computer Supported Collaborative Learning '97, Dec. 10-14, 1997, Toronto Retrieved from http://lilt.ics.hawaii.edu/lilt/papers/1997/CSCL97.html on February 20, 2006.

This article also deals with how new computer software can enhance inquiry learning, however the article is careful to point out that technology cannot stand alone as a means to inquiry: “Computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) technology will have an impact only if it is designed along with methodologies and materials that provide support for teachers who are learning to implement nontraditional activities in their classrooms, and address concerns such as integration with the curriculum and effective utilization of inadequate computer resources.” The software highlighted in this article was called Belvedere: “Belvedere's core functionality is a shared workspace for constructing ‘inquiry diagrams,’ where students can share and evaluate the data of their inquiries.” Another special feature of this software was that it allowed students to evaluate each other’s projects. Finally, this software not only helped to teach the students about science, but it helped them learn more technological skills, become more organized, and take a more active role in their learning. By Amelia Bowen

Vallance, E. (2004). The Adventures of Artemus and the Llama: A Case for Imaginary Histories in Art Education. Art Education, volume, 7-12.Vallance describes ways in which students can create an understanding of how museum artifacts were made, who made them, how they arrived in the museum, and what values they reflect about where they came from as well as about the current museum and its community. Through imagining dialogues between pieces, exploring their histories, and thinking of whose hands they might have passed through along the way, students generate stories about the objects’ lives that connect them through time from their makers to their current homes. Some of the activities mentioned in this article help to guide students’ investigative process and imaginative journey so that they make connections between the historical and social context the piece came from and the present relationship it has with their own cultural lives. by Doriet

Digital Libraries in the Science Classroom An Opportunity for Inquiry Raven Wallace, Joseph Krajcik, and Elliot Soloway University of Michigan Digital Library Project Middle Years Digital Library Project University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan (ravenmw@umich.edu, krajcik@umich.edu, soloway@umich.edu) D-Lib Magazine, September 1996 Retrieved from http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/567/01/09wallace.html on February 20, 2006.

I found this article to be very interesting because it tied librarianship to inquiry-based learning through digital libraries. The authors did a study of “scaffolding student learning through on-line tools.” They argue that digital libraries provide the means for inquiry because they allow students to have greater access to the scientific information that is the most interesting to them. The authors defined inquiry as involving investigations, collaboration, and artifacts. They also stressed the importance of technological tools in inquiry. Digital libraries are especially beneficial tools because they allow students access to resources and expertise not found in their science classroom textbooks. The authors also argued that digital libraries take the extra work out of inquiry, as teachers do not need to spend extra time searching for materials for students’ investigations. Also, digital libraries support different styles of learning as they present resources in a variety of formats. Digital libraries are likely to have more current information than the students’ textbooks and even their school libraries. The authors discuss their own digital library, called Artemis, as having “improved search capability,” thus making it a more desirable tool for inquiry than the average search engine. More than focus on their own software, however, the authors advocate bringing science, digital libraries, and inquiry together in the classroom to provide the most comprehensive learning environment for students. By Amelia Bowen

D. L. Ball Bridging Practices. Intertwining content and pedagogy in teaching and learning to teach. Journal of Teacher Education, Vol 51, No3, May/June 2000 241-247

review by Luisa

This is rather a theoretical article and it is important as being part of a new direction in mathematics teachers' preparation. However, I chose it for this literature review because it refers to two common issues of inquiry-based learning: the separation of theory from practice and of subject-matter from pedagogy. The paper approaches this very important issues in the contexts of teacher education and learning to teach. If a future teacher receives separate preparation how is then she/he supposed to solve the connection in the context of teaching practice?

The article poses the problem of how divided education leads to fragmented practice. D. Ball recognizes this as an old problem in education. "On the ond hand, to what extent does teaching and learning to teach depend on the development of theoretical knowledge and knowledge of subject matter? On the other hand, to what extent does it rely on the development of pedagogical method?" The paper argues for the necessity to not only accept the integrity of subject matter knowledge and pedagogy, but especially to find ways of how this should be accomplished. In this sense, the article proposes in the end three problems to be solved: "identifying the content knowledge that matters for teaching," "understanding how such knowledge needs to be held," and understanding "what it takes to use such knowledge in practice."

I have been pursued by the article's theme that pedagogy and subject-matter need a way to be re-integrated in the specific context of teaching. I have been just reflecting on the author's view that subject-matter and pedagogy are in a theory/practice as method dichotomy. I have been reflecting on that because the pedagogy has its own theory hard to be "applied." This point is rather omitted in the article. I wondered then if the article does not move then the dichotomy from the view of learning/practice to a new view between field-disiciplines? More I am concerned of the way method is used in the context of pedagogy. A teacher needs a space for "inquiry" into her/his teaching and the use of method as tightly connected to the discipline poses several issues in the very incipient stage of understanding an educational phenomenon.

P. Ernest. Forms of knowledge in mathematics and mathematics education: Philosophical and rhetorical perspectives Educational Studies in Mathematics 38:67-83, 1999

Review by Luisa

In this article, P. Ernest re-evaluates the impact of last decades' developments in mathematics education. The author argues that with the new developments, the social context of mathematics has been revealed and the dominant role of absolutist philosophies was shaken. Because of these new views, in mathematics learning, it has been recognized various forms of knowledge. In understanding mathematics there is not only propositional , explicit knowledge, but also tacit, implicit knowledge.

The author debates the problematic of justification of such tacit, implicit knowledge. How one could justify the tacit knowledge. The argument against it says that "implicit knowledge is a misnomer, for what passes under this name is either tacit belief (including misconceptions) or implicit method, since it lacks the robust justification that epistemologists require of knowledge." However, tacit knowledge, the author debates, has the an empirical warrant: that of rhetoric and performance. In that sense, one needs to accept that a proof is "a fundamentally social act." This is because a proof becomes a proof after the social act of "accepting it as a proof." P. Ernest attentions to different subjective interpretations the teachers use when they wvaluate their students work in mathematics. In most cases, teachers' interpretations are a matter of rhetoric. "For example, despite its mathematical correctness, a pupil's answer of 1/4+1/4=2/4 may be marked as wrong when the teacher desires the answer to be given in lowest form (i.e.1/2). In conclusion, the author remarks that institutions recognize and warrant only explicit knowledge. He suggests as a complementary of the development of mathematics understanding "the rhetoric of school mathematics needs increased attention by mathematics educators."

I approached this article because of its attention for the variety of knowledge kinds one experiences in the learning of mathematics. Inquiry-based learning develops and grows on personal knowledge. Tacit knowledge is a fundamental component of it (Polanyi, M.).

I have been, however, intrigued by the separation made between "students' subjective conceptions and thought processes" and the constructivist views of learning. In this sense, the author mentions the role of the teacher. "Likewise, learners may construct individual and sometimes idiosyncratic personal understandings of mathematics but effective teaching must shape their mathematical performances and representations. Learning to shape one'w own mathematical representations involves engagement with the rhetoric of mathematics, which is thus central to both the context of learning and the context of instruction and assessment." (p.79) I wondered how this rhetoric of mathematics is present in teacher education methods class?