Here goes...

The information learning activity I am undertaking is a History inquiry with a Year 7 class. To this end, I will be searching the terms: inquiry, history inquiry, primary education, upper primary education. I will be using these search engines: ProQuest, Eric, A+ Education Data Base, Google Scholar and Google and I will also be accessing information from the Brisbane Catholic Education (BCE)website.

Brisbane Catholic Education (BCE)

One source of information I have found useful from BCE is the following document: Resourcing an Inquiry Based Curriculum. It has some interesting insights into not only what inquiry based learning looks like, but also suggests some models, including Kuhlthau's, and states what an inquiry is not. This handout points out that 'memorizing facts and information is not the most important skill in today's world. Facts change, and information is readily available -- what's needed is an understanding of how to get and make sense of the mass of data'. Whilst the students in my research group will be studying an ancient archaeological site, they will be making assumptions and forming opinions about history from what has been learnt from the excavation of this site. I have to ask myself, 'Is this an effective inquiry?' I'm still not sure...

What am I doing?

One of the most intersting things I have seen that looks at the need to move from the industrial model of education into a 21st Century pedagogical approach, which incorporates the use of inquiry based learning, is this video by Sir Ken Robinson - Changing Education Paradigms. This video points out the necessity to educate children so that they can become effective life-long learners for the 21st century and beyond. In order to do this , we can no longer simply fill their heads with information we deem important, but empower them to seek answers and solutions to learnings that are relavent to their own lives and their place in modern society. This does not mean to say we drop everything and allow students to disregard the learnings of the past. We need to find a way to make existing knowledge relavent to our students and inspire them to use the prior learning to seek new answers and indeed, new questions.
I realise as I write this, that I am demonstrating Kuhlthau's third stage of the inquiry process - exploration. At this stage, I don't know if what I'm researching is germane to this task, but I will continue to persevere.

What to do...

Kuhlthau (2007) states that "Uncertainty is the beginning of learning. It is an important concept that underlies the inquiry process." I can certainly relate to this. My first foray into ERIC, searching for inquiry based learning gave me over 3000 hits and even as I made my search more refined, I still found it difficult to come up with the information that I deemed relavent to this task. I did find an article, however, Inquiry Unpacked: An Introduction to Inquiry-Based Learning (Jansen, Barbara A., 2011), in which the author stated that there are four participatory skills in the inquiry process - critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration, communication, and creativity and innovation. I have realised that in my endeavours to complete this task, I am employing aspects of these skills. The need to be a critical thinker is vital in staying focussed on the task and being able to discard extraneous information. This is a skill I can see I need to continue to develop. I can tend to get sidetracked by what seems to be interesting information, but which, in the final analysis, does not serve the task. I will continue to persevere.