course is dedicated to improving the quality of education provided in schools, colleges, ... It is meant for teachers (i
Inquiry and Integration in Education Eight-month Web Course: 2015-2016
Course Outline 1. Aims There are two central problems that we must deal with if we are concerned about education in India. One has to do with social justice. Those who are concerned with this have been making efforts to make education accessible to all, to remove gender discrimination, and so on. The second issue has to do with the quality of education. These are both equally important, but this course is dedicated to improving the quality of education provided in schools, colleges, and other educational institutions. It is meant for teachers (in a school, a college, an institute of research and/or education such as IIT, IISER, NISER, …), school principals, directors of institutes, teacher educators, textbook writers, members of central or state board of examiners, syllabus designers, curriculum designers, ministers of education, secretaries of education, those working for NGOs having to do with education, and those who are planning to pursue one of these paths. It is important that school, college, and other curricula aim at: i) an understanding of the concepts and propositions of knowledge; and ii) the ability to apply (i) to a range of familiar (and novel) problems and situations. This is hardly sufficient though. We believe that to qualify as ‘high quality’, curricula should go beyond (i) and (ii) to aim at: iii) iv) v) vi)
critical understanding: an understanding of the evidence and arguments for or against established knowledge as well as controversial concepts and propositions; the ability to think critically about concepts and propositions; the ability to engage in independent inquiry; and the capacity for an integrated perspective on (i)-(v).
The aim of IIE-2015 is to help the participants develop the capacity to design syllabi, teachinglearning materials, classroom activities, and assessment, oriented towards (iii)-(vi). To achieve this, the participants themselves would need to have the experience of inquiry in a wide range of domains beyond their comfort zones (ranging from mathematics and physical sciences to biological sciences, human sciences and philosophy), such that they develop inquiry abilities and an integrated perspective.
2. Central Questions Given the title of this course, we will be concerned with the following sets of questions: A) Education 1. What is education? 2. How do we help learners become educated? B) Inquiry 1. What is inquiry? 2. How do we help learners develop inquiry abilities? C) Integration
1. What is integration? 2. How do we help learners develop the capacity for integrating knowledge and inquiry? These questions raise a number of subsidiary questions: • What is the distinction between education on the one hand, and teaching, tutoring, coaching, training, and schooling on the other? Do the so-called ‘educational institutions’ (schools, colleges, universities, institutes) educate the young, or do they merely train them, or coach them to do well in exams? • What is learning? What is teaching? What is the relation between them? • What is the relation between inquiry, research, and knowledge? • Why are inquiry and integration important in education? Let us take a brief look at some of these questions.
3. What is Education? Students and parents often equate education with schooling: joining a program, attending classes, taking tests and exams, and receiving diplomas. In this view, educating is what a teacher does in a classroom. The challenge of raising the quality of education, then, becomes raising the quality of the teacher through teacher education. Diverging from this view, we define education as the process of becoming educated, and educatedness as a configuration of the attributes of mind-and-body that are of value to the learner’s personal, public, and professional lives, from the perspective of the well-being of the learner, humanity, other creatures, and the earth. This means that someone with no formal schooling, and not even a school certificate, can still be highly educated.
4. How do we Help Learners Become Educated? Given our view of education, it follows that classroom teaching is only one of the means to help learners become educated, and that teacher education is only one of the ingredients needed for improving the quality of education, because it requires raising the quality of: • syllabi (where a ‘syllabus’ is an articulation of the desired learning outcomes, not merely a list of topics); • teaching-learning materials (including textbooks); • classroom activities; • assessment (assignments, tests, exams, ...); • educational policies; and • infrastructure. In this course, we will be concerned not only with pedagogy (the means to achieve the syllabus goals), but also the design of syllabi, of teaching-learning materials, and of assessment tasks.
5. What is inquiry? Inquiry is the investigation of questions (including problems) whose answers we don’t know, at the individual or collective level, relying on our own experience, observation, and reasoning. The outcome of inquiry is a body of conclusions that we call knowledge. Hence, inquiry may also be viewed as the process of creating, justifying, and evaluating knowledge. What, then, is the distinction between inquiry and research? Research is inquiry that aims to make a contribution to the collective pool of knowledge. Since research calls for an understanding of the state-of-
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the-art knowledge, school students and undergraduate students may not be in a position to engage in research, as they don’t have the required knowledge base. However, it is both feasible and desirable to engage in inquiry from a young age, even the primary school level. The core components of inquiry are: • noticing and formulating interesting questions to investigate; • identifying and implementing appropriate methodological strategies for the investigation; • finding answers, and arriving at conclusions from those answers; • justifying (proving, defending, arguing for, ...) the conclusions to the satisfaction of the inquiry community; and • critically evaluating the questions, conclusions, and justification, both at the individual and collective levels. In this course, we will be concerned with helping students develop their abilities in each of these components of inquiry. These abilities are of value to our personal, public, and professional lives; and for those who wish to pursue a career in research, they act as the foundations. To get a sense of the kinds of classroom strategies that can be used productively in InquiryOriented Education, watch the videos at the ThinQ youtube channel https://goo.gl/IdzX8r. For downloadable teaching-learning materials, take a look at the resources at http://www.schoolofthinq.com/pages. This course seeks to help the participants develop their abilities in each of these components of Inquiry-Oriented Education. A tangible outcome of the 9-day face-to-face Workshop (Part 2 of the course) would be a set of lesson plans created by the participants, and the outcome of Part 3 of the course would be samples of inquiry-oriented syllabi, textbook chapters, and assessment tasks.
6. What is Integration? By integration, we mean connecting what are otherwise perceived as unrelated fragments, and unifying them into a coherent whole. To take an example, students learn the terminology of translation, rotation, and reflection as transformations in a geometry class, but they do not perceive the connection between rotation and translation in geometry and the rotation and revolution of the earth on an axis. Students learn about the structure of the atom, the structure of a water molecule, the structure of proteins, the structure of crystals, the structure of cells, the structure of the human heart, and the structure of a poem, but they typically do not have an understanding of the concept of structure that runs through these specific instances. They learn the proofs of theorems in mathematics, but they are unable to see the connecting thread between mathematical proofs, proofs in the criminal court, experimental proofs, theoretical arguments in science, and philosophical arguments in ethics. In biology, they learn about animal and human brain, animal mind, and animal society, but they are unable to integrate this with the study of the human mind in psychology and human society in sociology. Central to this enterprise is unearthing what the equivalent concepts in diverse fields, disciplines, and discipline groups have in common, along with a sense of their differences.
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7. Learning Outcomes The learning outcomes of this course consist of three strands: A) Rational Inquiry 1. Mathematical Inquiry 2. Scientific Inquiry into the physical, biological and human aspects of the world, including their historical dimension 3. Conceptual Inquiry 4. Ethical-moral Inquiry 5. Aesthetic Inquiry B) Integration of the concepts of Knowledge and Inquiry C) Curriculum Design that incorporates (A) and (B) into syllabi, teaching-learning materials, classroom pedagogies, and assessment tasks.
8. Practical Aspects of Implementation Educational reform can be implemented at various levels: A. the government level of central or state boards (e.g., CBSC, ICSE, …) B. individual schools, colleges, or other institutions, with support from the principals/directors who want to make a difference within the constraints imposed by the system C. individual teachers who want to make a difference within the constraints imposed by the school/college/instituation, and D. individual members of public who are willing to help the young learn outside of educational institutions. Ideally, there would need to be intervention at all these levels. We will leave (A) to those who are in positions of power. Our primary focus would be on (B) and (C), with assistance from (D). In order to achieve the dual functions of helping students (i) do well in existing exams and tests, and (ii) become educated, we suggest a Dual Curriculum model that pursues both these goals. Two versions of this model are given below: Dual Curriculum Model: Recommended Dividing the the curriculum into two components, allocating equal time and resources for both: 1. Education component: aims at understanding, application, critical understanding, critical thinking, inquiry, and integration. 2. Coaching component: aims at helping students to do well in exams. This would require selecting a small number of questions and conclusions that lend themselves to the goals of the education component (some of which may be prescribed syllabus topics), leaving the remaining topics to be dealt with for in the coaching component. Dual Curriculum Model: Conservative Allocating 10% of the time and resources for the education component, and retaining the bulk of the curriculum more or less as it is, but reducing the time and resources to 90%. This can be done by introducing Inquiry and Integration as a school subject in Class 7 or 8 (two hours a week), and gradually expanding it to cover Classes 1-9.
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