Thanks, Sara and Bill, for your interest in the work of the 'Developing
Inquiring Communities in Education Project' (DICEP).
Bill asked whether we would call our approach - in which we have
>focused on the ‘object’ of our activity, seeing this not as learning,
>but as making and improving artifacts of various kinds
- 'collaborative inquiry'. That is _exactly_ what we call it and, in my
recent book, 'Dialogic Inquiry,' I have explained the rationale for this
approach, which I see as an attempt to realize understandings based on
CHAT, Dewey and the social semiotics of Halliday in the current
sociopolitical context of public education. As Sara suggested, there are
many constraints to be contended with, not least the exploitative
intentions of 'the business community,' as these have been embodied in the
new (but largely retrogressive) Ontario curriculum, with its emphasis on
transmission and testing retention of a standardized curriculum of basic
facts and skills, at the expense of more open-ended inquiry and the
construction of shared understanding through joint activity. This
certainly adds another level of necessary inquiry, as we try to find ways
of leavening this unbaked dough and of keeping the spirit of inquiry alive
as the students and their teachers worry about 'preparing for the tests.'
The group of teachers concerned are from different school districts and
teach at different grade levels from K-12 in schools that range from
suburban to inner-city. What they have in common is having studied for
their M.Ed. at OISE and, after being encouraged to become teacher
researchers in one or more of their courses, they have come together in a
collaborative inquiry group aimed at making collaborative inquiry the
organizing principle of the learning and teaching in their classrooms.
For seven of the last nine years, we have been supported by a grant from
the Spencer Foundation. This has enabled us to pay for recording equipment
and assistance from graduate students in transcribing and analyzing the
observational data that is the core of the evidence that the teachers and
I have used in our inquiries and subsequent publications.
The DICEP group has published well over 50 articles, chapters and books (I
can send a complete list if you're interested, including those that can be
accessed on the internet) and we currently have a book in press at
Teachers College Press, tentatively entitled 'Action, Talk and Text.' Two
articles, by Zoe Donoahue and Karen Hume, can be found in the first issue
of Networks, the Online Journal for Teacher Research (URL below), and the
current issue of Research in the Teaching of English contains an article
by Mari Haneda and myself entitled 'Writing in knowledge building
communities', which draws on the work of several of the teachers.
To return to my original posting: My thought was that there are some
important parallels between the DICEP group and xmca. In both cases, I
think, the community has developed around and through collaborative
efforts to improve the various objects that are the focus of our
activities.
What do others think?
Gordon Wells
gwells@oise.utoronto.ca
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~gwells
Visit Networks, the Online Journal for Teacher Research
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~ctd/networks
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