A Fringe of Inquiry
When I think of different ways to set up a learning institution, I usually wind up thinking about Jane Addams and Hull House. The settlement house movement of the late 19th and early 20th century has a lot of lessons to offer us in the progressive education community. That’s not terribly surprising, since Addams worked closely with John Dewey when they were both in Chicago. Reading Democracy and Education is great, but seeing how Addams and her colleagues worked to put that theory into practice is invaluable.
I teach Addams’ “The Function of the Social Settlement†whenever I teach an epistemology class because I like to have my students talk about their vision of their education, especially its practical benefits, and see how that fits with Addams’ vision. There’s a passage that always sticks out to me. She talks about how one of the middle-class, college-educated residents at Hull House wanted to take a group of working-class immigrants from the surrounding neighborhood on a tour of one of Chicago’s museums. The immigrants found it difficult to appreciate the works they saw, because they had no background knowledge of the traditions or contexts involved. – knowledge that their guide had spent a lifetime acquiring. The mistake, Addams says, is thinking you can take someone from culture and background and dump them into an entirely different context and expect them to appreciate the new environment. You can not, she says, throw “a fringe of art†onto a day spent at a factory; you can’t throw it on a life that is not immersed in it or connected to it and expect the art to make any kind of connection.
A fringe of art. I love that phrase. (It’s repeated in her memoir, 20 Years at Hull House.) And I think about it often as I try to put my own educational philosophy to work in an environment that seems ill-fitted to it at places. I believe in the Deweyan, pragmatic ideal of inquiry more than ever. I see the potential for approaches like project-based learning to bring that ideal to life. But as I look at my own practices, I wonder if I am not trying to throw a fringe of inquiry onto my teaching.
When I started teaching at the high school level, I had a lot of ambitious dreams about allowing my students to use the technological resources at their disposal to research the world around them, identify problems or areas of confusion, and then figure out what historical events in the curriculum connected to that present-day question. The reality that I’ve come to face is that many (not all) of my students – like many of the people in the world – don’t really care about how the world around them works. They don’t want to take it apart of fiddle with it or tweak the settings to make it function a little better. They just want it to work so that they can get back to doing what they’re doing. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this in a lot of cases. I believe Apple has made about a kajillion dollars satisfying this desire in technology users. But it makes it harder to find that initial point of curiosity that can serve as the launching pad for an investigation.
Starting the inquiry is only part of the question, of course. The next issue is, once a student has found a problem to investigate, how can the student do so in a fruitful way? Here I find a difference between the way I think about inquiry and the way my students think about inquiry. My approach is to start gathering sources, to read and listen and watch things until I have gathered a body of information. Then I can look in that body of information for facts that connect together and try to tell a story about whatever I’m researching. Of course, I began my career as a student long before Google; heck, long before Yahoo and Lycos. For many students today, the path to inquiry begins with typing a question into a search engine and ends with copying the first hit onto their paper. The more I read about the iPhone 4S and Siri, the more I expect that teachers in a few years will be requiring their students to talk into the smartphones rather than keep them hidden at all times.
While I appreciate the convenience, I also think there’s something to be said for doing things the long way and understanding the knowledge that you’ve built. So I’m trying to teach my students the skills they would need for inquiry the long way – close reading of texts; broader keyword searches; finding and summarizing main ideas; outlining; evaluating media sources; and plenty of others. By the time I’ve really helped students practice and build some of these skills, I barely have enough time in my district-mandated schedule to squeeze in a project or two, especially if I’m trying to make a connection to events in the contemporary world that don’t quite have a spot on my planning and scheduling timeline. It’s hard to tell if there’s real inquiry happening, or just a fringe.
I will certainly continue to refine my own practice. As I build better relationships with my students I hope I will see more opportunities for genuine inquiry into subjects that they are about passionately. But I also believe that this is way beyond any one teacher. There are schools around the country that build a culture of inquiry from a young age, but there aren’t enough. We need to create more, to help students find the spark of education-for-personal-growth early and then build the skills and habits to help that spark grow. If we do, I think we’ll be pleasantly surprised by what we discover together.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.
Thursday, October 13th 2011 at 1:45 pm |
Dave,
I like what you say here and it reminds me of a quotation from Ted Sizer, “The best we educational planners can do is to create the conditions for teachers and students to flourish and get out of their way.”
Throwing the fringe of anything into anything is rarely going to have the effects we hope for. Structuring and building toward those places makes the difference. It’s not quite scaffolding. It’s more laying the brick road between ideas.
As for there being something to say for doing things the long way, I want to know what that is. The long way was the long way because we didn’t have a shorter way. That’s okay. I could board a steamer for a trip to Europe, but I’m not going to. I’m going to get on a jet and fly there. What if we think of it differently? What if we think of the modern conveniences as giving our students access to the new long ways? Saying, “You don’t have to struggle with these pieces because I want you to be able to struggle with these more complicated pieces.”
Most of the time when I hear or make the argument for going the long way ’round, it’s rooted in a feeling of “well, I had to learn it this way, so they should too, clearly it’s the way to become X.” I don’t think it is. I think we became X through walking that path, but that path is grown over, folded up or otherwise indisposed.
You’ve made me think.
Thanks for doing that.
– Zac
Thursday, October 13th 2011 at 4:16 pm |
Sometimes the long way is exactly what you suggest – a refusal to acknowledge that things are different and, in some ways, easier. Take websites that will help you create properly formatted bibliographic citations. I haven’t used them much, but from what I’ve seen, they’re awesome. I would never want to tell someone that they have to lug around a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style in order to figure out the proper way to cite a paper.
But sometimes the long way is like making your own pizza dough and sauce from scratch instead of heating up a frozen pizza or ordering from the place around the corner. In both cases, you have pizza at the end. But doing it the long way, you see how the pieces fit together. You see how you might need less water in the dough on a more humid day. You figure out that you really do like some extra oregano in the sauce before you put the cheese on. When that pizza comes out of the oven, it’s yours in a way the frozen pizza never could be.
But back to your point, I don’t bake my own sandwich rolls. That’s more time and effort than I have to give for something that I can walk around the corner and buy. So part of what I’m trying to figure out is the difference between the pizza and the rolls. Which long ways offer me a useful, deeper understanding? And which long ways are just going to leave me tired, frustrated, and probably covered in flour? And of course there’s never one answer that you can give and be done with it.
Thanks for returning the favor. I appreciate the dialogue.
Dave