“Inquiry” is one of those words that you encounter almost on the daily if you teach for First-Year Writing. You’ve probably been told over and over that our program foregrounds inquiry. But what do we mean? And why?
For our purposes, an inquiry is a question that grammatically and socially invites a response. An inquiry—the act of asking a question—serves as the first move toward building relationships among students and between the students and the instructor. Although we initiate those relationships in our classrooms, we believe that a well-crafted inquiry can help students develop questions worth pursuing that exceed the boundary of the classroom and encourage students to engage with multiple lines of thought and thinkers over time. Beginning a course with an inquiry invites students to join us in an academic endeavor and opens a door to other intellectual quests. However, while an inquiry may seem like it sets up a simple call-and-response, it never does, and the questions posed shouldn’t produce a closed loop. Inquiries should open up many responses; our questions should not be easy to answer, nor should they pose problems that can be readily resolved. We want our inquiries to engage with wicked problems.
But how do we begin to tackle wicked problems?
Wicked problems are chock full of interdependent factors, incomplete information, and unsettled definitions, which makes them overwhelming and unsolvable. To break down the process of working through a wicked problem, we invite students in UConn FYW courses to start with themselves by centering their experiences and sharing them with one another in order to develop a sense of the myriad considerations and get to know some of the diverse stakeholders. Learning about others’ experiences invites them to question their assumptions about their knowledge and experience of the world. They may find that some students have had similar experiences, so they don’t feel alienated, but also begin to see patterns emerge, or they find that they have had a unique experience and notice a gap. Through patterns and gaps, students begin to make something; they develop their own lines of flight and ask their own questions. Inquiries create the conditions that inspire curiosity.
In other words, by introducing uncertainties, inquiries foster curiosity and the desire to know more. In the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, one of the habits of mind is curiosity. Our role as instructors, then, is to help students recognize and use their own intelligences by creating the conditions that motivate their curiosity. The inquiries we devise should not drive students toward a way of thinking that we hope they will adopt; instead, we design the questions, assignments, classroom activities and dialogues that enable them to develop their own lines of inquiry. Our “Habits of Practice” provide an iterative process (and not a procedure) for developing these lines of flight. For example, the course flow in the baseline inquiry, “What is an Education?” starts with students representing their own experiences with education in a series of brief anecdotes or descriptions of their experiences learning. These anecdotes are then assembled into a class archive that students explore to trace patterns, recognize anomalies, and, overall, to consider and begin making sense of a wide range of other students’ experiences. During a series of classroom activities designed to support exploration and analysis, a student may draw some preliminary conclusions, but as they examine each new artifact, they must consider whether that artifact validates or challenges their hunches. And then we ask them to revise their hunches to accommodate what they’ve seen in the class archive. They use their revised hunches to begin formulating questions to ask of interviewees in their fieldwork. The interviewees may introduce yet more experiences that students must grapple with in terms of their emerging lines of thought. The culminating assignment for that series of activities and processes of thinking, considering, and revising is the Humans of Education interviews (modeled on Humans of New York). But we don’t let the students’ inquiries rest there. Students then read some challenging texts about education written by professional writers, artists, and scholars. As students engage with these texts, they must continue to confront different ways of thinking and different ways of accounting for experiences; we again provide opportunities for students to reconsider their developing inquiries. Students’ intellectual horizons are again expanded as they research the many contexts their ideas emerge from and may enter into. It’s not until the students begin to plan for the baseline podcasts that they settle on theories they develop to account for the collected materials; the scholarly frameworks; the social, experiential, and intellectual contexts; and imagine the kind of impact they can have on audiences who encounter their work. We are not leading students to believe one thing or another about education, we are not restricting the experiences or texts they work with, we are not containing their lines of thought within a particular context that we determine, we are not orienting them toward a particular way of thinking, we are not enclosing the field of possible. We have instead orchestrated the activities that work abductively, a process of reasoning that uses observation, experience, and engagement to allow them to create plausible conclusions.
Throughout this work, students’ own inquiries encounter doubt and wonder that are the conditions for imagining the possible. With the possibility of multiple perspectives, inquiry invites us to explore differences without settling on a certainty. In these differences, we find dissensus. And while it seems like what we need at this moment is consensus, consensus, in fact, flattens differences and forces compliance. According to Helen Verran:
A politics of dissensus, like any politics, is concerned with ‘What particular choices present themselves in this here and now?’, ‘What is at stake in those choices?’ and ‘How might those choices be made?’; but, unlike the politics of consensus, where those questions are ruled out of play after a consensus has been agreed, in dissensus those questions continue to remain active. (54)
We teach our students to seek and value a kind of dissensus that carries the responsibility of bringing the community together by challenging the basis on which our consensus is built and asking who and what was left out of that consensus. The dis of dissensus suggests division, but when students drill into an archive and confront the many different experiences their classmates have had, they encounter what we might call the “unforeseeable” together (Heimans, Singh 192). Some of the archive’s entries may validate their experiences, but others will challenge what they might have assumed is normal, or certain, or fixed. Through the shared experience of working in the class archive, the individuals discover that they do not know everything and cannot imagine all perspectives. They can then begin to speculate on what the many shared and anomalous experiences might mean. This is the value of dissensus. Put another way,
‘Disagreement’ and ‘dissensus’ do not imply that politics is a struggle between camps; they imply that it is a struggle about what politics is, a struggle that is waged about such original issues as ‘where are we?’, ‘who are we?’, ‘what makes us a we?’, and ‘what do we see and what can we say about it that makes us a we, having a world in common?’ (Rancière 116)
To know more, the students learn from one another; they must rely on the we of the classroom. We want to teach our students that socially responsible intellectual work does not happen in isolation, which is why we call it a shared inquiry.
In a recent class, students began working through the archive of their “anecdotes of learning” for the shared course inquiry “What is an education?” As small groups worked on several anecdotes, they tracked patterns and marked anomalies in the documented experiences. As patterns and gaps became visible in the work, students began to formulate their own questions:
- Why are so many classes competitive (e.g., grade distributions)? Why are there gatekeeper classes? What effect do gatekeeper classes have on students who are on tracks (pre-med, pre-law)?
- How do college professors learn to teach? Do they ever change the way they teach?
- What makes school so anxiety provoking?
- Why is education considered essential to happiness and success?
- Why do we focus so much on being an individual?
- How do we realize personhood?
- Why is the word ‘education’ so highly associated with school when we learn so much outside of school?
Each of these emerging questions is different and presages very different pathways of thinking, and yet the shared course inquiry serves as a foundation for their work. With support and in collaboration, the students are developing their own inquiries within the course’s shared inquiry. We can foster the practices of inquiry by putting materials and activities in the way of the students because by doing so (as the students’ questions make clear) we can help them make their intelligence visible to themselves. If we confine students to a particular way of thinking (or a particular thought), then we remove the wicked from Wicked Problems. By designing an inquiry that creates momentum for many different lines of thinking, we can help students defy gravity.
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Works Cited
Heimans, Stephen, and Parlo Singh. “Putting the steam back into critique? ‘Gathering’ for critical–dissensual collaborations in education policy research.” Policy Futures in Education 16.2 (2018): 185-201.
Rancière, Jacques. “A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière. Parallax 15(3): 114-123.
Verran, Helen. “Governance and land management fires [:] understanding objects of governance as expressing an ethics of dissensus.” Learning Communities: International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts 15 (2015): 52-59.