But I would go one stage further and argue that one should attempt to create
a _community_ of researchers/inquirers, in which all participants - teacher
and students as well as the "visiting researcher" - make the activity of
learning and teaching a collaborative focus of inquiry. This is the basis
on which our research group, the "Developing Inquiring Communities in Education
Project" - and others like it - works. Each of the classroom teacher
members of our group is engaged with her or his students in exploring
the potential of an inquiry approach in some area(s) of the curriculum,
with the active participation of one of the university members of the
group. At the same time, through monthly meetings and ongoing email
conversations, we are all using the evidence from these classroom
inquiries, and our reflections on them, as the basis for our group's
collaborative action research.
In a response to Peter's message, Katherine Brown wrote:
> What a good topic!! Glad to see people saying more about participant
> observation. Another example of the embracing of rather than the
> denying or downplaying of the presence and effect of the researcher(s)
> in and around the phenomena of interest is found in a lot of Developmental
> Work Research, as carried out by Yrjo Engestrom, Ritva Engestrom and
> others who do long-term studies (many that go on for several years)
> where they show research subjects the videotapes that are made of
> them in the workplaces under study and use the tapes and the interviews
> about the tape contents to help research subjects actively and reflectively
> think about their work and look for solutions to problems that are captured
> on tape.
We, too, are using video and audio recordings of classroom activities as
tools for inquiry. Several teacher members of our group have played back
the video tapes for the students' reflective consideration and some have
even made transcripts of segments of them and then recorded the students'
discussions of those transcripts. There is no doubt that this encourages
students to take a "meta" stance to their own actions and significantly
raises the quality of classroom discourse (spoken and written) both about
the curricular topics under investigation and about the relationship
between actions and outcomes.
We also use these recordings of ongoing classroom activity in conjunction
with the artifacts that are used and produced, together with interviews with
the students and among ourselves, as tools for thinking with, as we try to
understand how best to develop communities of inquiry. Currently, we are
focussing on the role of writing in this enterprise - both the writing of
students in different genres, such as reports, stories, etc., and
reflective entries in their learning logs, and our own writing on email
and in our collaborative authoring of papers for publication.
We've stopped thinking of the increased engagement of participants as
the halo or hawthorne effect of carrying out classroom inquiry and,
instead, think of communities of inquiry as the very essence of education.
Rather than a short-term intervention, we try to make inquiry the
continuing "motive" of the activity of education, in which we are all
engaged.
Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.on.ca
OISE, Toronto.