Inquiry

Right now I’m encouraging my students to break out of the five-paragraph essay format of writing that they’ve always known. I’m asking them to write something called Inquiry. Inquiry is the new thing in education.

I first ran across the word when I was working with the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project two years ago. A few of their members had spent three years “performing an inquiry” into the WPWP—where its strengths and weaknesses were, etc. It seemed that “inquiry” was the word the humanities used when they were doing a study. In business terms, this questioning into one’s own organization is compiled into a report called “white papers.” Every discipline has a way of questioning its own processes.

So what, then, am I asking my students to do? I keep telling them that an inquiry is an essay with a Thesis Question rather than a Thesis Statement. Instead of declaring what inquiry is, as a class we explore what inquiry is together. This makes for a complicated class. Instead of declaring what they know in a really one-sided, persuasive way, I’m asking them to question what they know.

It’s an inquiry into what they think.

This blog post was a quick inquiry into what I think inquiry is.
Good job, Renee. Back to work.