Instructor: Margery Osborne

Office: 386 Education

Phone: 244-1271, 244-8286

Email: m-osbor@uiuc.edu

This course explores the creation of classrooms in which students and teachers are actively engaged in making meaning through personal and collaborative inquiry. Issues will include integrating across traditional curricular areas, themes, projects, student-centered learning, and connections between the classroom and the social and natural worlds beyond the school. One major issue is a new role for teachers as inquirers about their own and student's learning. The course will also examine challenges to inquiry-based instruction, including those related to management, assessment, basic skills, cultural differences and assumptions, and the responses of parents, principals, and other teachers.

The primary goal for this course is to provide an introduction to a way of thinking about teaching and learning. This way of thinking does not ignore the usual focus on content: "What should be taught?," or method: "How should we teach?," but it begins with even more basic sorts of questions, such as:

What is the purpose of education?

Why do we have schools?

What does it mean to know something?

How do my personal goals relate to how I perceive the world and how I learn?

Why should anyone learn a given skill or bit of knowledge?

How does what I do in an educational setting relate to the world beyond?

Where and how does learning occur?

Is teaching possible?

As Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner discussed in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, asking questions like these can get you into a lot of trouble. Simple and obvious assumptions about teaching, such as "We need to have clear (even national) standards for what is to be learned," "Learning objectives should be explicit," "The teacher should always provide clear explanations to students," "Learning should proceed from simple tasks to more complex ones," "It's important to determine the learner's readiness to learn," "One has to learn the basics first," and many more, turn out to be neither simple nor obvious.

We hope that the course will provide an opportunity for dialogue about these issues. To expand the basis for that dialogue, we will read about, observe, and engage in, inquiries about phenomena in general, and especially about our own teaching and learning.

Each week will typically involve three kinds of activities:

(1) During class, we will engage in our own inquiries into topics beginning with an extended exploration of fish, ocean life and oceans themselves. The purpose of this is not so much to accumulate a set of teaching activities as to provide a common experiential base for us to talk about teaching and learning. The topic reflects my personal area of expertise in elementary science teaching but isn't meant to suggest a particular subject matter emphasis of the course--it is rather an extended vehicle for our conversations.

(2) We will focus on teaching and learning practice through the development, application, and study of inquiry-based approaches to teaching and learning. Part of the class time will be devoted to sharing what we're learning through the research projects and to discussions aimed at understanding what occurs in different learning settings. In particular, the second half of the class will be devoted to this sort of "sharing" in which various members of the class will take responsibility for leading us through an inquiry experience.

(3) We will discuss articles drawn from a packet of readings. The packet is a diverse collection, including descriptions of classrooms, analyses of student learning, theoretical analyses of inquiry, and critiques of these approaches. They are meant to be read and thought about within the context of our own inquiry projects.

Readings and discussion [25% of grade]. You will be expected to participate in discussions of readings throughout the semester. In addition, you will work with a partner to co-lead a discussion session. This is an opportunity for you to suggest alternative readings or to bring in samples of writing from your class or your own work. You and your partner will share your responses to the readings and initiate the class discussion. We plan to work with you in preparing that discussion.

There is a packet of readings for the course, available from Notes and Quotes on John Street. There are also three books which can be purchased from Horizon Bookstore

Writings [25% of grade]. Writing will include reactions to the readings and responses to the writing of others in the class, especially on the research projects. A new web-based communal environment will be used to extend discussions beyond the scheduled seminar meeting times.

Research Project [50% of grade]. The major assignment for the course is a teaching/research project on the development, application, and study of an inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning. The project is ideally a collaborative one, done with other students in the class or with people outside the class. Projects will be presented in class in such a way that we, as a class, can try out parts of them. In addition I would like our conversations to be around what happened when the units were tried out in classrooms.

For each project there will be three written products (weeks 4, 8, and 15) which will be posted on the web site (ie they are not going to be turned in to me on paper!):

February 4 (week 3): Formation of teams for research projects;

February 11 (week 4): A written plan (~1 p.) that includes a brief description of a the learning setting, your ideas for what you plan to do, a short list of questions to explore, and a sketch of how you plan to investigate those questions;

March 11 (week 8): A progress report (~2-3 pp.) that includes some examples;

April 8 (week 12): Draft report (~5-10 pp.) to share with the class or small working group for reactions and suggestions;

On going class presentations of projects, final written description of project due last class.

The final written description of the project will include a reflection on what happened when it was implemented with children.

Jan 21 An introduction to "inquiry teaching"

read (in class) Michael Armstrong, "A Day in the Country"

Barry Lopez, "Children in the Woods"

Eleanor Duckworth, "Learning with Breadth and Depth"

Jan 28 Class activity: Fish Prints

read John Dewey, "The Child and the Curriculum"

Joni Chandler & Gina Rester-Zodrow, "Moon Journals"

Feb 4 Class activity: Fish and Cephalopod Fossil Drawings

read Eleanor Duckworth, "The Having of Wonderful Ideas"

begin, Phyllis Whitin & David Whitin, "Inquiry at the Window"

Feb 11 Class activity: Visit Natural History Museum

finish, Phyllis Whitin & David Whitin, "Inquiry at the Window"

begin, Kieran Egan, "Teaching as Story Telling"

Feb 18 Class activity: Examine live lobsters and crabs

read Jerome Bruner, "The Narrative Construal of Reality"

finish, Kieran Egan, "Teaching as Story Telling"

Feb 25 Class activity: visit Sail Fin

read Vivien Paley "Listening to What Children Say"

Eleanor Duckworth, "Teaching as Research"

Michael Armstrong, "Writers, Artists, and Philosophers: Thought and Action in a Primary School Classroom

Mar 4 Class activity: meet at Miko's

read Jerome Bruner, "Teaching the Present, Past, and Possible"

Dowell Smith, "Bubbles and Children: A Small Ethnography of Cross-Cultural Learning"

Mar 11 Class activity: meet at the pool on North Cunnigham

read Jerome Bruner, "Knowing as Doing"

Mar 18 BREAK

Mar 25 presentations

read Sylvia Ashton-Warner, "Teacher"

Apr 1 presentations

read Lisa Delpit, "The Silenced Dialogue"

Apr 8 presentations

read Maxine Greene, "Freedom, Education and Public Places"

Apr 15 presentations

read Maxine Greene, "American Paradox, American Quest"

Apr 22 AERA

Apr 29 presentations