The new media environment provides new
opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our
students seeking important and meaningful questions. Questions of the
very best kind abound, and we become students again, pursuing
questions we might have never imagined, joyfully learning right along
with the others. In the best case scenario the students will leave
the course, not with answers, but with more questions, and even more
importantly, the capacity to ask still more questions generated from
their continual pursuit and practice of the subjectivities we hope to
inspire. This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,”
in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but
on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the
types of questions that ask students to
challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own
underlying biases.
The beauty of the current moment is that new media
has thrown all of us as educators into just this kind of
question-asking, bias-busting, assumption-exposing environment.
There are no easy answers, but we can at least be thankful for the
questions that drive us on.
Paul Beaufait on 31 Oct 12Thanks to Nik Peachey for pointing out this post on one of his Scoop.it sites. In this post, Katrina Schwartz (2012.10.26) provides a pointer to the Right Question Institute (an NPO), introduces a new book about inquiry-based learning, and explains, "Coming up with the right question involves vigorously thinking through the problem, investigating it from various angles, turning closed questions into open-ended ones[,] and prioritizing which are the most important questions to get at the heart of the matter" (¶4). An excerpt from the book spells out rules for student engagement in forming questions about topics under investigation.
