Developing Inquiry for Learning

Reflecting Collaborative Ways to Learn How to Learn in Higher Education

Peter Ovens, Frances Wells, Patricia Wallis, Cyndy Hawkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136733536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Developing Inquiry for Learning shows how university tutors can help students to improve their abilities to learn and to become professional inquirers.

An increasing proportion of students entering higher education seem to assume that learning is a relatively passive process. This may be the largest single limitation on their achievement. University tutors need to be able to respond creatively to students' learning needs and difficulties. The modern teaching environment in higher education demands a sophisticated approach to teaching, learning and assessment i.e. the curriculum: its planning, its development and tutors' professional development. Tutors need fresh ideas about how to challenge students' spoon-fed approach, to enable them to become collaborative, yet independently motivated learners.

In the innovative and practically proven approach developed by the authors of this book, students are guided to implement action research into their learning practices and reflections. Using a rolling programme of cyclical inquiries and whole group 'conferences' on improving learning, students write 'patches' on learning development which are then shared across the year group online. Each student's cumulative set of patches, together with their regular reflective writing, provide the basis for assembling a composite final assignment, a 'Patchwork Text', for assessment. This style of curriculum and assessment organisation encourages regular peer feedback and formative assessment, as part of the whole module process. This is a dynamic approach which builds personal confidence within students, both as learners and as professionals.

Providing teaching materials and examples of students' responses, including the use of blogs, wikis and discussion boards, Developing Inquiry for Learning analyses and theorises on the deeper characteristics of the difficulties being addressed. With the provision of relevant frameworks of theory and values, readers are amply equipped to adopt, adapt and experiment within their own developments of teaching and curricula. Tutors, particularly programme leaders, and those who are responsible for the quality of student learning across programmes, are challenged in various ways to re-evaluate current provision and are helped to improve it in ways which can be matched to local situations and priorities.

Peter Ovens was Principal Lecturer in Professional and Curriculum Development at Nottingham Trent University and is now a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cumbria.

Frances Wells is a Principal Lecturer in Education at Nottingham Trent University

Pat Wallis is a Senior lecturer in Professional Studies at Nottingham Trent University.

Cyndy Hawkins is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at Nottingham Trent University

Chapter  1

Introduction

Is learning a taken-for-granted part of higher education? It just seems to happen on its own. Tutors who see learning as entirely students’ responsibility can give all their attention to the subject matter and its presentation. But a tutor who wishes to share responsibility and control faces questions about how much and what kind. Is it a minimal responsibility to organise the syllabus, the explicit curriculum, using principles such as progression: from less difficult ideas to more difficult ones, or from smaller, contributory ideas to bigger, more general ones? Is it enough to vary teaching styles, inserting a tutorial or two, as a break from block lectures, to maintain interest? Are there parts of the syllabus/curriculum which are better learned through practical work than by being told? Or should tutors go further, making larger assumptions about students’ learning and their needs, and plan in some depth and detail what learners are to do? Might this include planning learning tasks which determine a linear path of thought and cognitive development for students to follow? Or should there be open-ended activities, in which students’ own initiatives set the direction? What are the implications for the provision of resources for learning, not least, time? Are there pedagogic principles or theories which should guide decisions? Finally, does a pragmatic consideration of formal feedback from students and external examiners direct some decisions about how much control over and responsibility for students’ learning is taken by tutors?

At the time of writing, in the United Kingdom, undergraduate programmes are normally expected to address many of these sorts of questions. Every programme has practices and procedures which influence the students’ learning, making it harder or easier for any individual student to learn how to learn, as part of studying for their qualification. Programmes vary in terms of the extent to which such practices are tacitly determined by custom and by explicit principles, values and theories to underpin them, or procedures for tutors to sustain inquiry into their effectiveness, for programme and professional development.

How a student learns and how well they do so depends on the personal repertoire of learning habits or approaches which they have on entry. It is likely to need expansion and enrichment to meet the challenges of the explicit curriculum of their programme of study. There is also the implicit, hidden curriculum, the ‘rules of the game’. Like a stranger in a new cultural environment, students need to pick up the unspoken expectations, standards and procedures in order to be able to play the game. Also, there is a student’s experience of the learning culture which emerges in their seminar group, contributing to the characteristic expectations and patterns of interaction which, for tutors, make each group unique to teach. Within this are the subcultures created by small groups of like-minded students with shared attitudes and beliefs about learning and subject matter. Many students are able to adapt and develop well, showing qualities of autonomous learners. Others may flounder and some are unsuccessful.

The original design of the BA in Childhood Studies at Nottingham Trent University gave extensive consideration to students’ learning. With a cohort of about 100 students each year, it went so far as to decide to provide its students with ways of learning how to learn. This refers to the fostering of an amalgam of attitudes and abilities which enable a learner to improve themselves as learners as part of the process of doing their learning. A central core of the design is provided by a ‘learning how to learn’ component. There is one module in Year One and another in Year Two of the three-year programme, both called ‘Inquiry Into Learning’. This book is about the particular way of addressing these questions about learning which is incorporated within the Inquiry Into Learning (IIL) approach. At its heart is a vision of just how good it would be for (ideally) all our students to be fired up, lively learners, thirsty to know more and do better, able to think and act independently and keen to go on improving, for themselves and each other. The vision held by the IIL tutors has values which cluster around autonomy as a personal, professional quality we aspire to nurture in our students. We want IIL to do nothing to impede students whose autonomy is already working well, merely to provide them with encouragement, support and the space and time for their practice to mature and, for others, to provide a personalised, self-directed and collaborative framework for fostering growth of their autonomy as learners.

The way of learning called ‘action inquiry’ has appropriate characteristics for such purposes. It is about improving practice, which is what we think learning is, fundamentally. It involves looking carefully at the experience of learning, thinking reflectively, using ideas and knowledge to think better, to practise more wisely and much discussion. We ask students to do action inquiry into their practice as learners as the main way in which they learn how to learn at university. We conduct our own, second-level action inquiry into the improvement of our practice, which includes our pedagogy, curriculum planning, organisation, assessment and evaluation. This requires us to develop our shared, tacit purposes surrounding what we think autonomy is, routinely to notice many things about events and interactions in IIL module sessions, and to discuss them with each other, to develop ourselves and the modules, so as to sustain and revise our vision of autonomy. We have not tried to produce one large, detached, external, summative evaluation of the IIL approach but, by cyclic inquiry, we repeatedly made formative evaluations which point to immediate practical and theoretical improvements, for evolutionary change. In both students’ inquiry into learning and tutors’ inquiry into teaching, the crucially important feature of action inquiry is that aims and values are thought about interactively with ways to achieve them more fully.

We were always aware of the disjunction between this process element of the IIL approach and the separation of ways, values and aims that has become a state-imposed norm in formal education in the United Kingdom, and is increasingly influential in many other countries. We found ways of complying creatively with the national standards and standardised ways of planning inherent in a technical rationalist way of thinking and doing. The ‘target culture’ sometimes stimulated but never confined us. We found value in our attitude of acceptance towards the difficulties which students presented in their abilities to learn. As we gathered more evidence of the characteristics of these difficulties, it has become clear to what extent they are manifestations of the excesses of technical rationalism in previous learning. We tolerate the paradox that a positively accepting stance towards the effects of technical rationalism on the learning of our students liberates the autonomy of most of them, but is not sufficient to enable others to ameliorate their difficulties as we would wish, provoking their resistance to being emancipated and rejection of the IIL approach. We believe the evidence and analyses provided here justify adding our voice to calls for a radical reform of state-organised education. Learning at all levels needs to be liberated from strait-jackets of targets and standardisation. What is learned should be subordinated to how it is learned, because this creates conditions for the learning and the learners to grow in self-actualisation. Teachers and tutors need to be trusted to internalise and creatively operationalise common educational purposes and goals which embrace imaginative, inquiry-based ways of achieving and developing them. Control and power have to be shared more and centralised less.

This book offers the Inquiry Into Learning approach. It is not a blueprint for helping all students everywhere to learn how to learn in higher education. It provides an account of what are the IIL ideas in action, which are coherent with the context and people involved in one situation. Consistent with its philosophy, it also provides an account of how those ideas and actions began, evolved and developed through organised coordination of experience and reflective thought. Both the what and the how are a resource for colleagues who wish to reconsider and improve their students’ learning in any undergraduate programme. The book guides them through a process of development based on tutors’ own values and vision, growth of their situational understanding and improving practice through inquiring into it.

The IIL approach is presented in Part I. Chapter 2 provides preliminary thinking about learning in higher education and what learning to learn is taken to mean, in theoretical and practical terms. Key concepts concerned with knowing are addressed, including our working definitions of autonomy, education compared with training and personal development. Also, a fundamental assumption of the approach is stated. Some of the complexities of learning touched upon here are examined in more detail later. In Chapter 3, the IIL approach is set out, emphasising its general ideas and key procedures, in a form which facilitates application to different academic and professional contexts. Autonomy is considered further, definitions are provided for the pedagogical principles of the IIL approach and the Patchwork Text assessment is outlined.

Part II of the book shows how this approach has developed in one particular context and how its various aspects can be understood as resources for pedagogical, curriculum and professional developments. Chapter 4 is about the Inquiry Into Learning 1 module, describing its detailed practical operation and showing key features of the teaching and assessment. Chapter 5 gives a similar account of the Inquiry Into Learning 2 module. Both chapters are concerned more with the tutors’ perspectives than those of students, which come to the fore in Part III.

Part III provides evidence and analysis of the operation of IIL, focusing on three topics of wider interest. Chapter 6 is about the importance and power of student voice. This dimension of the IIL approach is considered with ample, rich evidence of students’ struggle to learn how to learn. A method for eliciting and nurturing student voice (literally – through structured talk) called ‘Intervision’ is explored in depth. Chapter 7 is about setting expectations for learning through building a culture of informal formative assessment into learning processes. Chapter 8 is about how the processes and products of learning in IIL are progressively being enriched by using information technology.

Part IV examines some personal, theoretical and philosophical roots of the IIL approach. Chapter 9 is about general principles of curriculum design, within which is set the Patchwork Texts (PT) method of curriculum design and assessment used in IIL. The distinctive ideas and values of a process curriculum are presented and applied to IIL. Several virtues of a PT approach are considered, particularly its consistency with the process-oriented views of learning we espouse. These include educative kinds of instruction, communities of practice and sociocultural perspectives. Chapter 10 sets out the fundamentals of the action research we have used to develop IIL, with professional biographical statements by IIL team members to explain their involvement and distinctive contributions. Chapter 11 asks what is the point of IIL, to probe into those underlying beliefs which have become significant to us through our accumulated reflective experience of teaching students to learn how to learn in higher education and assessing their progress. It provides further and deeper thinking about conceptual frameworks which clarify and strengthen the theoretical basis of those aspects of the IIL approach which are most relevant to meeting the current challenges to students’ learning in higher education.

Finally, Chapter 12 gives concluding reflections and summarised recommendations. It indicates current growth points in the further development of the IIL approach, and makes recommendations for students and tutors participating in other modules and programmes with similar aims to IIL.

Part I

The General Approach of Inquiry Into Learning

Chapter 2

Learning to Learn in Higher Education

This chapter is about a particular vision for learning to learn in higher education which stimulated the educational explorations, professional developments and curriculum achievements presented in this book. A good place to start is the university classroom.

A new academic year is beginning. A new group of students are starting their course. Module Handbooks are distributed and teaching begins. After everyone’s preparations and anticipations, the first moments have arrived. Here we all are, at the first session, looking at each other and weighing up what this new beginning is like. After some nervous, feverish introductions, things get under way. The tutor’s head is full of practical concerns about resources, organisation and subject content. As well as endeavouring to make the first session an interesting and enjoyable start, the students need orientation. Meanwhile, they are feeling their way cautiously into many kinds of unknowns. Let’s take a closer look at the different perspectives of tutors and of students.

Tutor’s Perspective

From the tutor’s perspective, much preparation (but never enough) has taken place. Naturally, the tutor wants to build on past successes and avoid difficulties. So, feedback from previous participants (students and tutors) has been considered and, where appropriate, acted on, in an effort to improve the student experience. Each tutor carries a lumpy bag of vague concerns as well as clear practical questions and sharp educational dilemmas such as:

• Will things that wowed them last year work as well with this year’s group?

• Might the new solutions to old problems work better?

• How to cover all content thoroughly and address key ideas deeply enough.

• How to prepare for the assignment without compromising the module content.

The tutor’s aspiration of a smooth first session may be realised. However, sooner or later, depending on how much opportunity was given for students to respond, encouraging signs may mingle with worrying signals. Maybe this year’s group reacts in unexpected ways. Disappointing attendance and negative body language seem to indicate that some students are becoming disaffected. Louder and/or more numerous voices suggest they know less than usual or that they find things more difficult. Some ask for more clarification of the module content or assignment or request closer guidance on the criteria of assessment; others seem to have settled quickly and to be happy with the new ideas. Vital questions that can get lost in all this: ‘Are they learning?’ and, if so, ‘Are they learning well?’.

Stopping to reflect on the whole enterprise, a tutor may think about their role as a teacher: first, as a teacher of their subject and, second, as a teacher of students. The experience of teaching this group now may be a shared enjoyment of the subject matter or, in the face of difficulties, it may feel more like a battle for survival and credibility. Either way, it is the tutor’s role to teach this module to these students. This may be seen as teaching the subject matter. Module aims normally specify mainly, if not exclusively, the knowledge to be taught. Students are obviously required to provide evidence of having learned what is necessary to progress. So, a tutor may, not unreasonably, take special care to teach the knowledge to be assessed, giving less attention to teaching students, whose learning is more or less their own responsibility. Module specifications may accentuate this priority by what is to be learned more than how it is to be learned.

This oversimplified picture of a teacher of a subject has the tutor transmitting clear, ordered subject knowledge by effective methods to their students by means of printed handouts, intranet documents and other sources plus the reading of set texts, as if knowledge were a commodity, either gift-wrapped or just dumped on students to take away and learn. A lesson plan may be like a timetable for coverage of the subject content and the planning of whole modules, and even the programme, may be similarly driven by delivery of the subject matter.

Detailed attention to curriculum planning is given in Chapter 9, where the following point is developed more fully. Higher education has come under growing central direction to use an objectives approach to curriculum planning with precise statements of what must be learned prespecified as objectives and/or outcomes. It encourages clear thinking about aims for specific skills and unambiguous items of knowledge. However, one of the several dangers of a dogmatic application of this model of planning is its failure to adequately guide the planning and assessment of aims that go further. Any tutor or programme which aspires to enable students to think and act critically and creatively with the knowledge and skills they gain needs to go beyond the objective/outcom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: The general approach of Inquiry Into Learning
• Part II: Using the Inquiry Into Learning approach in two modules of a Childhood Studies programme
• Part III: Using experience of the Inquiry Into Learning approach to address topics related to developments in higher education
• Part IV: Theoretical and philosophical bases for the Inquiry Into Learning approach
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index