STLHE: If inquiry’s so good, how come it’s so hard to make it work?

Session Title: if inquiry’s so good, how come it’s so hard to make it work? Strategies for introducing inquiry into the curriculum [paper abstract]
Presenters: Jim Rice, Dale Roy, Wayne Warry. Mcmaster University.

Inquiry is one of those pedagogies that’s really hard to get. Inquiry is a big deal at McMaster (where I work) yet I’m certain I don’t have a good enough handle on it. Rochelle (who was also at STLHE) has a great post on the topic, including a whole slew of questions around the wisdom of dropping students into an inquiry-based learning environment and expecting them to know what questions to ask when they don’t even know the basics of the topic. I don’t have any answers but I’m in a good place to do some discovery (a few of the librarians I work with are active contributors to inquiry-based curricula), so I plan to take a few colleagues out for coffee and pick their brains. I’ll report back when I have something to add to the discussion. For now, here are my notes from this session (which was a great session that answered many of my preliminary questions).

–

History of inquiry @ mcmaster
- 25-ish years old
- is university education the sum total of the courses that we take?
- inquiry as student-identified, student-driven.
- inquiry came in as a rear guard, underground, grassroots kind of movement, then it infused and infiltrated up to the top
- stared in 1979, by 1991 it had spread into Science & Engineering
- by 1997, other faculties bought in
- currently, 38 courses at McMaster have the word “inquiry” in the course title
- how did that diffusion happen? why?

Benefits of the inquiry methodology
- student engagement
- fosters active learning
- student confidence
- student interest
- encourages faculty members to explore these methodologies
- creates lifelong learners
- encourages critical thinking
- enhances student success
- skills-based
- inquiry mirrors the research enterprise and process

What are some of the challenges to the introduction of inquiry into the curriculum? (these came from the audience)
- no obvious payoff to the faculty
- departments would be resistant about diverting resources away from teaching the content
- inquiry is “a fad”
- inquiry takes time away from content. nothing we can do about this. but the fact is, the skills will pay off later for acquiring content
- cost of inquiry: high relative to a large lecture. But when you’re teaching skills, you can’t do it in a room with 300 students. A kin to teaching a language.

Getting inquiry to work
- start with an able champion (doesn’t make much difference when introducing inquiry into a course; but when you’re introducing curriculum change, this is crucial)
- start tracking outcomes from the start (creates a benchmark for students and faculty, goal is for everyone to be able to measure change, which is easier to do if you have a benchmark from the beginning; also allows you to be ready to answer your critics; useful for building support later; makes the exercise scholarly)
- if possible, use a team of instructors. why? role change is a challenge; a team can provide a range of experience. add someone from the teaching support office (or library); team creates interdisciplinary social environment; creates a learning community for students and faculty
- recruit senior students (use successful former students as peer tutors; as a window into the course; to test materials)

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Ahhh I wondered if you would see that post…and I wondered what your reaction to it would be. I felt that I was asking too much of the session. I know there’s only so much you can get across in an hour, but I really walked away not sure exactly what definition of “inquiry-based” we were working with; even the Mac faculty seemed to be working with different definitions.

I had the same experience at WILU this year too; though there they were more explicit about definitions, I was unimpressed with the concept they were pitching. I’m used to librarians devaluing their work and seeing themselves as some kind of lower-level service providers, so I was less surprised by what I was seeing there. Just go into a class and ask a question! Don’t rely on your own knowledge and experience to help guide them, just ask them what they want to know! If all they want to know is how to find pages from Canada in a Google search, well, that’s all you should show them! I can see that there’s a good idea buried in there somewhere, but I feel like these folks were rushing ahead with the icing and forgetting about the actual cake.

I got a different feeling from this session at STLHE, however. I’d really like to have seen some syllabuses from Mac, or some ideas about best practices from the Mac perspective.

So I’ll definitely be interested to see what intel you gather. Cheers!