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Enquiry Learning

John Schostak 2003

revised 2005

first published on ELU website

Introduction

It's not really a revolution. Enquiry learning has occurred ever since human beings looked around at the world and wondered what life was all about. However, in the context of nineteenth and twentieth century schooling, it is a revolution. The legacies of expert or authority-led learning to meet external requirements are still pervasive. However, teachers and learners are increasingly adopting a 'new' paradigm: enquiry learning. Why? because it frees creativity, facilitates dialogue, generates mutual respect and leads to productive engagement with the world about. So what is it?

I use the term to mean any approach to learning that is:

1. founded upon the realities of an individual's, group's or community's experiences of their everyday life and practice,
2. engages imaginatively with the world
3. involves critical reflection on experience
4. involves critical dialogue with others
5. explores the experiences of others in relation to one's own
6. explores creative means by which to engage with the experiences of others
7. seeks to identify, create and explore alternative ways of seeing, thinking, believing and being with others
8. employs a research based approach to the analysis, interpretation and the formation of theories, explanations, understandings
9. explores the conditions for implementation and change
10. and thus, and this for me is critical, is sensitive to political and ethical processes

Enquiry learning can be employed in any sphere of life. Indeed, what is at stake is life and how it is lived.