Gordon-
Thanks for the information and pointing out what you guys do. I'd like to
hear more about it. Maybe Sarah and Bill as well?
Marc
>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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