Freedom, Failure, and Learning

Two points particularly caught my attention at last Wednesday’s session. First was that many of the comments from students and from the subgroups seemed to have an underlying theme expressing the student’s excitement and engagement in being a participating member of their discipline or area of study. This was seen in comments about being given responsibility to inquire, not just given detailed instructions on how to complete an assignment. Second, was the use of the word “freedom” in several of the comments. That included the freedom to explore, to learn under their own terms, and to fail (“It is good to flounder and be confused.”).

Failure is an important part of inquiry. As a professional in my discipline, someone engaged in discovery research, the personal draw is to gain knowledge about that which is currently unknown. Achieving that knowledge most often means making mistakes and failing. I have often heard others in my general field talk about how perhaps only one in ten experiments results in the expected success. That has been my experience, too. Our best educated guesses are still only guesses. However, we also learn from our failures, often more than from our successes. This education stuff is all about learning.

If failure is part of our inquiry process in real life, then shouldn’t it be part of our students’ inquiry process? How often do we tell a student that it is OK to fail? How do we establish the learning environment that disassociates failure during inquiry from a failing grade? I think it can be done, but requires a very different way of thinking about how we evaluate learning in our students. I am sure that we will discuss this more later in the semester.

Thanks for your interest and contributions to the Learning Community. - Walt

Terrific Web site. Thanks for inviting me to join. Your project is very intersting.

Kim Graber

Theory and Practice

This semester I am participating in both the Undergrads Engaging in Inquiry group and the Service Learning Reading Group. Both groups provide stimulating--and sometimes challenging!--conversation and reflection. I especially enjoy listening to the participants describe the concrete assignments, projects, and activities that they do in their classes. Inspired by our readings and discussions, I have written new classroom activities, reflective diary prompts and midterm exam items. My own inquiry process will lead me to look at students' reactions to these new additions to my courses.

Definitions

I'm a little hung up on definitions. A couple of years ago I found a book by accident, searching on the title --- Learning by Teaching, by Donald M. Murray. He was a journalist who wrote for the Boston Globe and college teacher of writing. In the first couple of essays he talks about writing as a discovery process and, apparently, he was one of the pioneers in teaching this approach to writing. The writer learns in composing what is on the page and in editing that content. Writing in this sense creates something new based on the information gathered, the reflection on that, and the synthesis or interweaving of different ideas that occur to the writer in the process of writing.

Do we want to call that inquiry? If we do then I'd argue further that essentially all learning motivated by curiosity is inquiry. Or do we want to narrow the definition of inquiry? It's hard to weigh in on the benefits without having the definition.

In our last session, there was a point raised by the students that it is really different from their courses working on open ended questions, the answers to which produce new knowledge. But that knowledge might be known elsewhere, only not known to those working on the questions.

Since I blog, and I do try to investigate ideas a la Murray, I can comment based on experience about the benefits of doing that sort of thing. I really can't comment intelligently about having undergrads work in a lab. That's outside my realm.

Please Post

Members of the FLC, please feel free to post your comments or thoughts about the Undergraduates Engaging in Inquiry program, either related to topics discussed in the weekly sessions, or about other topics not discussed.

Please indicate your name when posting to this blog.

Good luck.

Walt

Welcome to Undergraduates Engaging in Inquiry

We are establishing a faculty learning community (FLC) at the University of Illinois that is examining the topic “Undergraduates Engaging in Inquiry.” We have specifically chosen this title because it emphasizes the role of the student in inquiry, a learner-center focus, rather than the primary focus on how we as teachers should engage students through inquiry. Certainly along the way we will share ideas and models for how we can teach inquiry to students. However, our goal is to better understand the impact that engaging in inquiry has on student learning and how we can facilitate that learning.

We have identified four questions that will be the focus of discussions for this semester. These include a) what value does the undergraduate student gain by engaging in inquiry, b) what value does the instructor gain from their students engaging in inquiry, c) how can we apply what we have learned about inquiry to our classroom learning environments, and d) how can we implement, document, support, sustain, and assess the impact of students learning through inquiry?

In addition, I want to better understand how others think about undergraduates engaging in inquiry. I suspect that there will be a range of viewpoints among the FLC members. I anticipate that my own views and understanding will evolve through the semester in response to these discussions.

Other questions will arise as the semester progresses. The purpose of this blog is to provide a forum for the members of the FLC to express their thoughts on those other questions. We will try to post a different question or thought each week and encourage the FLC to respond to that.