Another part of weaving for me in this project has been making the connection between my inquiry and the inquiry of children and young adults. Not only do I feel that my inquiry process has many of the similarities, especially the nervousness, but I also feel that being more in touch with my process and being able to describe its recursive nature would serve well the students I have taught in the past in making connection with inquiry on their own.
As I was discussing this with a colleague, he pointed out that I could lay out my inquiry process step by step and show how I back tracked, developed search terms, etc... in discussion format with a class of students I was assisting in developing their own inquiry skills. This project could be used to help students with a rural knowledge base really connect with and share their expertise in how they would go about making decisions about preparing for, purchasing and caring for livestock. We could use the fact that the topic was very broad and needed to be defined, the question development, etc... would really be something many of my farm kids could have done much more easily than starting them on a topic such as the revolutionary war or World War II which they had less background knowledge in many cases to connect to. That was always very important for the students I worked with who were not certain of their academic abilities to recognize their areas of understanding and helping them to transfer those skills to further develop their information literacy and their academic skills.
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Nice post. I like the transference a lot. In addition to sharing it with students, I think you could share it as an inservice topic for teachers who require students to do research topics. I think teachers are frequently guilty of blaming student apathy on the learner. I don't deny that some students are apathetic, but I think all of us must look at our lesson design with as much scrutiny as we look at our students' bad habits. Information inquiry is tough any way you shake it, but having to do it on a topic with no personal relevance borders abuse. Focusing on making connections between our curriculum and our learners has to have a postive impact on reducing apathy.
Agreed--students bring their own baggage, but so do we as teachers! Remembering that helped me a great deal when having a student who was obviously having a rough time, versus having a class that I was having a hard time with because of my planning and/or connecting with them as a group.
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