The Limits of Inquiry-Based Instruction

Inquiry-based learning dates to Dewey and Kilpatrick nearly a century ago.  There are some unacknowledged issues with the method, if taken at face value, that I want to explore.

The question for advocates of inquiry in the classroom is, How far do you want to go, given the implication in contemporary rhetoric, that the only authentic learning students do is when they can construct their own knowledge through inquiry or problem solving? 

Consider for a moment the problem that English teachers face who insist that students follow Modern Language Association formatting conventions in their essays. An inquiry approach would begin with a discussion of the nature and need for conventions in general, and writing in particular.  Perhaps someone in the class would mention the unintelligibility of papers that ignored rules of grammar or spelling, perhaps someone else might suggest that intelligibility is the only standard a paper should need to meet.

Perhaps the class would be asked (the passive voice is indicative of the teacher’s role as facilitator) to examine a variety of student essays, only one of which complied with MLA requirements, and asked to comment on what, if any, issues the diversity (one of our favorite words these days) might create.  Of course, students may be of the mind that the variation—not chaos, surely—is a good thing, that students need to be free to express themselves as they see fit, just as they do wearing different clothes or different hair styles.  Suddenly, the facilitator loses her justification for MLA standards, because her class insists it is empowered to determine what the conventions shall be.  What to do?  Does the teacher follow the logic of her instructional method and give up her goal?

But assume the class has a more orderly mindset and offers the suggestion that diversity in this case is indeed chaotic and requires uniformity.  It might arrive at the conclusion that a single format would be the solution and that, democratically, students should vote for a specific standard.  Is our teacher further toward reaching her goal?

Perhaps the next step is to research what standard English students are called to observe.  It’s the process championed by many advocates of inquiry-based learning.  On the other hand, the resources students will find will be prescriptive, and a teacher could do that just as easily, even if it did turn out to be an—ugh!—lecture, or, worse, a PowerPoint!

What makes this lesson inappropriate is that the teacher’s role is misinterpreted.  She should be, in this instance, not a facilitator at all, but a guide, a Virgil to show students the way to participate in the set of conventions that constitute the practice of scholarship in the profession known as academic English.  This is an initiation, a fitting in, and it is not only guided, but dictated by the expert in the room, who is already part of the community she invites her students to join in spirit as well as deed.  However, declining to fit in will not be tolerated.

It may be possible to discover professional standards through inquiry by college freshmen, but is that how we want to spend our and their time?   I’d rather simply tell my students what the profession expects—in fact, I require them to use a Word style sheet that observes MLA conventions—and spend our time learning how to write persuasively.  There is something to be said for efficiency, especially when students are too inexperienced to know about external standards of work.

Similarly, I want to provide a grounding or context for my students that makes whatever inquiry I may have them engage in more than a just-for-the-hell-of-it exercise.  We used to call that scaffolding.  But to read some accounts of inquiry, direct instruction is to be avoided.  Induction is everything.

For probably most of us, the choice of direct or inductive instruction is a matter of appropriateness for given goals rather than an ideology we feel we must defend with our every act.  However, I have a friend whose school system has moved to a very aggressive adoption of a “constructivist” model, and it appears to be pushing teachers to avoid attacking specific problems with tested solutions, simply because they aren’t part of the paradigm.  This is the danger of turning a perspective into an ideology.  If the publisher of the district’s curriculum is a reliable source, my friend’s school district is not alone.

It is ironic that in an environment where we celebrate ethnic, racial, and gender diversity, we disparage and discourage methodological pluralism.  This is a mistake,  because inquiry-based methods can’t do everything in a classroom that we need to do, at least in the time we are given.  It is a mistake also because it assumes students learn only one way authentically, and there is therefore only one way to authentically “facilitate” that learning.  That is not our experience.  It’s not what we know to be true.