I think it was a few class sessions ago that we discussed what it means to read critically and how teachers should go about teaching students to do that. The complexity of these seemingly simple questions really puzzled me and left me thinking for quite some time afterward. For this reason, I found Ray’s piece on inquiry-based teaching really thought-provoking. I was at first somewhat reluctant to accept Ray’s notion of the efficacy of this method of teaching/learning. I thought it was a little bit risky as a pedagogical strategy and too loosely structured for comfort. But having gone through all of Ray’s explications and illustrations–as well as Skinner’s own model of inquiry-based learning in conjunction with critical media literacy strategies–of the ways that inquiry-based teaching can and does work in the classroom, I became convinced of the method’s power to help students learn critical reading and writing skills.
I was particularly drawn to Ray’s emphasis on immersion within well-written, real-world texts that, after all, are from and are representative of texts from the real world. Often times students encounter in the classroom oversimplified writing samples and models that have no resemblance to good, quality writing. Even the academic writing that college students encounter have no resemblance to the sort of writing that they are taught to learn as young students. Letting students figure out, roughly for themselves, what good writing looks like can be a powerful strategy that encourages deeper levels of examination and critical interrogation in reading. As Ray stresses over and again, students must not merely be taught so they can learn, but instead taught to learn how to learn.
I think there’s a lot of power in letting students learn through immersion. Of course, this method of teaching presents many challenges and risks. Clearly, it is much more difficult to improvise a lesson than come to class prepared with one. Furthermore, inquiry-based learning places a lot of pressure on the students themselves to be active agents in their own learning. But I think this is what this type of learning is all about: the challenge of and growth that spring from inquiry. If we judge students’ work on what they do correctly and what learning they’ve exhibited in their work, rather than on what they fail to do or include in their writing, teaching through inquiry can be an empowering strategy for both students and teachers alike.
What I found initially troubling was this idea that the curriculum is to be generated with the students and not all planned out beforehand. But what’s really poignant about this exercise is that teachers will gain instructional expertise from it, and content expertise will necessarily follow. No teacher can be an expert in everything s/he teaches, but any teacher can become an expert in teaching students how to learn. As Ray suggests, I believe that the key to critical reading, writing and thinking is rooted in this idea that process is infinitely more important than product.