Enquiry and Project Based Learning

Students, School and Society

David Leat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138790179
• eBook ISBN: 9781317650874
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Many teachers, schools, parents and community organisations feel that 'standards' education is not serving us well. It has proved ineffective at preparing many students for work, higher education and general wellbeing, nor does it keep students engaged and intrinsically motivated, capable of sustaining interest in education and learning. There is a supressed desire to transform educational outcomes, and enquiry based learning (EBL) and project based learning (PBL) are the prime candidates for achieving such a goal.

EBL is education that is driven by curiosity, questions and problem solving, with the capacity to produce results that are equal to or better than standard outcomes. This new text provides a critical examination of EBL and PBL by exploring a wide range of international exemplars and considering the benefits, barriers and contradictions generated by the efforts of teachers and schools. Focusing on analytical frameworks and socio-cultural theory, areas covered include:

• enquiry and society
• what EPBL is
• learning through enquiry
• challenges for schools and teachers
• student outcomes and assessment
• teacher learning
• curriculum development.

Enquiry and Project Based Learning offers analytical frameworks and practical guidance for students, teachers and all those interested in enquiry based learning, as well as presenting a balanced, purposeful and motivating alternative to mainstream educational practice.

1
Why We Need Enquiry and Project Based Learning

David Leat

Introduction

In adulthood much of our learning both in work and in social life is conducted through enquiry and solving problems. When we want to know how to do something well – plumb in a washing machine, make lemon drizzle cake, organise a celebration or family party, apply for a government benefit, buy a new bike, make films of our children, grow flowers, get a good tattoo, sew sequins on dresses, buy and sell things on eBay – we do not usually sit in a classroom and take notes, do comprehension exercises and listen to a teacher deliver a lecture. We use a form of everyday enquiry, which is a mixture of finding out a bit from books or the internet, asking a friend, making a start and having a go, getting specialist advice, watching other people, taking stock and evaluating, going back to any of the above to check things out. We also use enquiry modes when we have a problem, although we may be operating under more pressure when we have lost the house keys, double-booked ourselves, gone over our bank overdraft limit, burned a birthday cake or had a row with a member of our immediate family. However, we do not recognise this as enquiry and so people do not recognise enquiry sufficiently as a learning process. This informal and often collaborative and participative process needs wider recognition. There is a need to learn from what and how we learn in places other than schools, without rejecting the best of traditional schooling.

It is worth also listening and watching out for individual testimonies concerning pivotal turning points in people's lives. In interviews, biographies and conversations it is so common to hear people, both famous and ordinary, refer to people, places and experiences that in some cases were just memorable, and in others a transformation in their view of the world and their place in it. Although some of the people who feature in these narratives were teachers, they were the teachers who made connections, took their students out of the classroom and gave them learning experiences. It is very rare, I believe, that people refer to being set and reaching numerical targets and grades. We look for meaning in our lives, things that resonate. It is well illustrated in these narratives from a TED blog (2013) that addresses the question of ‘Teachers who inspired us?’¹ They make clear that teachers who stimulated and respected curiosity and lit the fuse of ongoing projects had profound effects on their students:

Robert Baldwin's class ‘Essay and Inquiry’. Every day: Walk into class. Sit down. Look at the handout on every desk. Read it. Start writing. Class ends — stop writing. Every day. Except Wednesday, when we'd put the desks in a circle and everyone would read something they'd written. The prompts were everything from simple questions like, ‘What's your favorite memory of trees?' to readings from Rachel Carson or W. B. Yeats or Orson Welles. It was a whirlwind of ideas, and the constant writing forced us to wrestle with them, and (tritely but correctly) ourselves. It was like a boot camp in thinking. People I know who took, and loved, that class went on to some of the most amazing careers. Every time we get together, we gush about the quiet, unassuming, force of nature that was Mr Baldwin. He would have hated that last sentence, because the metaphor is strained. But he also taught us to ignore authority, so I'm writing it anyway.

(Ben Lillie, writer/editor)

I took my first painting class my sophomore year of high school and fell in love with it. My teacher, Ms Bowen, told me I could use the art studio whenever I wanted to, and gave me access to all kinds of new paints and canvases. I spent almost every lunch period there for a few years, and regularly stayed in the studio after school ended. One day, Ms Bowen told me that a parent of a student I had painted expressed interest in buying the painting of her daughter. After that first sale, I painted portraits of kids in my school on a commission basis, and continued to do so for the remainder of my high school experience. Thanks to Ms Bowen's mentorship, I felt empowered to try to make money from something I was passionate about and loved to do.

(Cloe Shasha, TED Projects Coordinator)

By contrast, contemporary schooling in many countries delivers a thin gruel of meaning, causing many less academically successful students to disengage and many successful students to game the system so that they make it to the next fence in the educational steeplechase. We can do better, and this book presents the contribution of enquiry and project based learning (hereafter EPBL) to providing a better education for more young people. In nearly all education systems, we need to give more time and attention to more divergent and participative approaches to learning embedded in the curriculum.

Anna Sfard (1998) drew attention to two metaphors for learning and warned of the dangers of choosing only one. The first metaphor was acquisition, by which she meant how facts and other knowledge entities were received, acquired, constructed, internalised, appropriated, transmitted, attained, developed, accumulated or grasped. The second metaphor is participation, by which she refers to learning through doing in a particular context, indeed learning cannot be considered separately from context, in which one learns by watching, copying, practising and becoming accepted. While there have been critiques and elaborations of the two metaphors (such as Akkerman and van Eijck, 2013), most would recognise that human learning processes and outcomes are more varied than are supposed in the acquisition model and we should heed the warning of the dangers of choosing only one modality of learning. In formal education the acquisition metaphor dominates and it is accompanied by strong classification and framing (Bernstein, 1975). Bernstein, a sociologist working in the second half of the 20th century, was concerned with why ‘working-class’ students did relatively poorly in school. He developed a range of very powerful analytical concepts to explore this phenomenon. In classroom contexts, ‘classification’ refers to the strength of the boundaries separating curriculum subjects, so strong classification describes a curriculum in which subjects are taught with little reference to each other – they are separate domains. Projects reflecting societal issues see subjects as somewhat secondary and in service to the issue. They would be described as having weak classification, where ‘weak’ is not a negative term.

Framing refers to implicit rules that underpin learning contexts. Strong framing reflects classroom relationships in which teachers are very much in control and make all the decisions and thus influence the behaviour of students, who do not assume much responsibility. ‘Realisation’ rules, which are essentially unwritten, determine how pupils should behave, move, speak and write in some detail, through the expectations of the teacher. In weak framing students get some say over the content, direction and pace of learning. Thus many EPBL contexts would be characterised by weak classification and framing, in which students have some degree of agency and teachers assume less authority, but this is not to say that they have no influence on learning. Framing (Bernstein, 1996) is described as a key locus of change in pedagogic settings.

The importance of curriculum is that it is an expression of our vision of future society, not just a document about what pupils are taught in schools. Wiles and Bondi (2007, p. 5) capture some of this sense in the following: ‘We see the curriculum as a desired goal or set of values that can be activated through a development process culminating in experiences for students.’ Schools do shape students' lives far beyond the exam results that they achieve or indeed fail to achieve. The experience of school can have profound effects on how people see themselves, how they conduct their lives, how they see and interact with others who are different from themselves, how they conceive of the world and therefore how they see their role and responsibility in wider society. School can seed ideas, foster skills and talents, including creativity, find hidden qualities and introduce people and places to young people that will have a lasting impact. In this way curriculum can help shape the form of society we wish to create for ourselves. In short, school, in the shape of curriculum, can be part of human flourishing. The choices made regarding curriculum are therefore political and informed by values. A curriculum dominated by the acquisition metaphor severely limits the process of human flourishing. One view that underpins this book sees humans as highly social animals (Gergen, 2009) – we achieve and create through cooperation and we become who we are through others, with others and for others, while retaining a core individuality. This is a values position and informed by a view of society and what makes it tick. In this view education should play its part in bringing young people into being truly human members of society. It is a process of becoming (Biesta, 2009) and in this process we are often changed as humans, coming to see the world differently. This is not likely to be achieved if we predominantly choose the acquisition metaphor. The participation metaphor opens up the dimensions of self-efficacy, identity, flourishing and human agency.

It is justifiable to look at complex modern societies and argue that their functioning and achievements in industry, infrastructure, agriculture, public services, technology, medicine, music, theatre, visual arts and sport are quite remarkable. Therefore education and curriculum cannot be doing so badly after all. There is some truth in this argument and, as such, it reinforces the principle that curriculum needs to honour the acquisition metaphor, in the form of good direct subject teaching while making more space for EPBL. There are echoes here of Young and Muller's (2010) argument about pursuing a Future 2 curriculum, avoiding the worst excesses of a subject dominated Future 1 curriculum and a process-dominated Future 3 curriculum. However, humanity, collectively and individually, faces some very serious challenges: poverty, inequality, injustice, environmental degradation (Ceballos et al., 2015), inter-communal violence, mental health problems and lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, alienation and social segregation. Furthermore, the 21st century does more than offer problems, as there are new opportunities too for young people to take advantage of the new century and its affordances in technology, communication, leisure and travel. Schools in England, the UK generally, and also globally, are working very hard to help students pass examinations, which are the current proxy for education, but it is more difficult to argue that they are doing the best that they can to prepare students for society facing such challenges and possibilities sketched above.

Understanding enquiry or inquiry?

In this book ‘enquiry’ is taken to be a generic term for modes of learning driven by questions and curiosity. Curiosity arises when our attention is drawn to something and underpins a motivational desire to know and, as Schmitt and Lahroodi (2008) point out, it encourages tenacity in learning. In the classroom it is often hard to distinguish enquiries from project based learning, as good projects are often driven by curiosity and questions. The Oxford English Dictionary defines enquiry as: ‘The action of seeking … for truth, knowledge or information concerning something: search, research, investigation, examination.’ It is confusing that both enquiry and inquiry are used with little distinction in meaning. Hutchings (2007) attributes the alternative forms to linguistic history. He argues that ‘enquiry’ reflects the entry into English via Old French, whereas ‘inquiry’ arose when ‘linguist antiquarians’ reconnected the concept with its original Latin root as in inquaerere. Science tends to use the term ‘inquiry’, but this book will generally use ‘enquiry’, as it carries somewhat wider connotations. ‘Inquiry’ will only be used where authors or projects specifically used that term. In use it has become associated with a range of purposes but, as Hutchings asserts, whether it is a relatively open-ended or relatively closed convergent process, the core of enquiry is the question. The genesis of those questions is important and I would stress the significance of student curiosity and creativity as being the source of questions whenever possible. This gives learners the precious gift of some choice and investment in their learning, which is generative of engagement. This, however, does not rule out enquiries that are driven by questions formulated by the teacher or other adult, as students can come to own them.

School in the 21st century: the wrong answer and better answers

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

(H. L. Mencken)²

Educating young people in the 21st century is a complex problem, because they face some daunting challenges in making successful transitions from school to further or higher education, adulthood, citizenship, democracy and work. The clear and simple answer to this problem in many political systems, notably in English-speaking countries, is a curious mix of market ideology and government control, in which state authorities set ‘standards’ and test whether those standards are being met (Mansell, 2007). The logic is that this will prove that state education provides value for money and encourage competition between schools to ‘drive up standards’. Without such improvement, economic performance will suffer (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2010). This ‘answer’ to the complex problem is – simply – wrong. We are stuck with anachronistic educational systems, as if weighed down and chained to the concrete blocks of an educational model developed in the nineteenth century. Across the globe we have inherited a hybrid of education for gentlemen, and training for industrial workers and artisans, although the mix varies from place to place. If the curriculum is a manifestation of our vision of future citizens and future society, then we are failing in our imagination and in our duty to future generations, because we can do better.

This failure is epitomised in the daily itinerary of many secondary students whose education involves routinely visiting different classrooms for episodes of between 40 and 100 minutes where they sit, predominantly passively, while a well-intentioned and hard-working subject teacher instructs them according to precise and predetermined learning objectives related to these subjects – a pure expression of the acquisition metaphor. There are precious few connections between these episodes, nothing of substance is produced except work for the teacher to assess, no one visits the room (except to rate the teaching and ‘progress’ in learning) and only rarely would students leave it. Students almost never ask a meaningful question; they only receive knowledge over which they have no control or choice. Connections to daily experience, personal interests or contemporary issues are scarce, although some teachers make a noble effort. Interaction with other students is usually limited to their immediate classroom neighbour. Lingard (2007) has dubbed such a model as pedagogies of indifference.

Performativity

If the prevalent logic is that schools will improve if an educational m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• 1 Why we need enquiry and project based learning
• 2 Understanding enquiry
• 3 Assessment of learning outcomes in EPBL
• 4 Enquiry and project based learning: students, school and society through a socio-cultural lens
• 5 Adapting Self Organised Learning Environments to primary schools in Australia
• 6 Balancing structure and flexibility: teacher’s orchestration in collaborative long-term inquiry
• 7 Developing a community orientation through a focus on local heritage and environment
• 8 The importance of audience in project based learning
• 9 The Broomley Bee Meadow Project
• 10 Community curriculum making and EPBL
• Index