The Starting Point for Inquiry
…. what might happen if we approached curriculum topics as abundant, or alive, unfinished conversations with space to ‘become?’
How might schooling look differently if we approached learning as the play between what is known and what is not yet?
This could be framed as taking an inquiry approach to the disciplines we teach. The starting point for an inquiry-based stance is to see the material in our curricula as topics or topica (L. spaces) as opposed to disconnected, isolated, and trivialized bits facts and skills. In the their best and truest form, the topics we teach are alive and actually exist in the world beyond our classrooms walls. Be it history, mathematics, biology, art history, psychology, the content of our programs of study actually exist out there in the world.
As educators we don’t need to invent or fabricate space or possibilities within the topics we teach – they exist already. The disciplines we are entrusted to introduce to students are actually alive and breathing, dynamic and ever changing. And most importantly, the disciplines are not yet finished. They, like us and the students we teach, are still in the process of becoming.
If we take this approach to the content of schooling, the work for teachers is to search for and then design learning around the spaces between what is known about a particular topic and what might be imagined or created.
(a few lines from my masters thesis…. hopefully done soon!)
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