Saturday, October 6, 2007

More Wishing.

There is one main difference between my personal inquiry experiences and those of the young adults that come into my school library media center. My experiences for this class and otherwise would mostly be considered inquiry experiences, whereas most young adults come into the media center to do information problem solving, according to Stripling’s definitions. I began with a question, while students are most often assigned a problem or information need. This goes back to Callison’s explanation of controlled/directed inquiry, guided inquiry, and free inquiry. “My” students are still in middle school or high school, so they’re still doing primarily controlled inquiry, while I am in grad school and trusted with occasional free inquiry assignments. I feel that some high school classes would be able to handle free inquiry, or at the very least, guided inquiry, but I think teachers are sometimes reluctant to try it or have no faith in their students. And I really don’t blame them; students generally want to be given a clear direction instead of having to think of it themselves. It takes a patient teacher to encourage students during a free inquiry project. I do think, though, that it benefits students to do this kind of thinking.

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