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Childhood Education
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Learning through Inquiry
J. Richard Suchman
Published online: 20 Sep 2013.
To cite this article: J. Richard Suchman (1965) Learning through Inquiry, Childhood Education, 41:6,
289-291, DOI: 10.1080/00094056.1965.10728968
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00094056.1965.10728968
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Learning Through Inquiry
By J. RIC H A R D
TEACHERS
TYPICALLY
SHOULDER
THE
lion's share of responsibility in shaping
the knowledge and concepts of their
pupils. Explanations, readings, demonstrations, recitations, films and other
techniques are employed to deliver new
ideas and information and to motivate
students to learn. When the teacher takes
the responsibility for leading children
toward new understandings, he must
make certain assumptions about the children with whom he is working. First,
he must assume his pupils have the prerequisite understanding and intellectual
skills to obtain the desired meaning from
what the teacher is saying and doing.
Second, he must assume that the pupils
will find these learning experiences reFEBRUARY 1965
sue H MAN
warding enough to invest the energy
needed to form new conceptual organizations.
Any teacher who takes the time to determine the level of conceptual readiness
and intrinsic motivation of each of his
pupils before and during his teaching
activities finds that it makes no sense to
teach an entire group of children as a
group. He can never presume that any
two children start from the same set of
concepts and move with equal speed and
along parallel lines of conceptual growth.
Actually, the problem becomes even
deeper than this. Can a teacher give concepts to pupils under any circumstances?
(Continued on next page)
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Is an active pupil role a necessary condition for true conceptual growth? It is
clear from the research on teaching
strategies that the more active and autonomous the learner becomes in a learning
process and the more he takes responsibility for decisions regarding the collection and interpretation of information,
the more meaningful the learning becomes and the more motivated the learner
becomes.
Stimulating and
Sustaining the Process
Learning that is initiated and controlled by the learner himself as a means
of expanding his own understanding is
inquiry. Three conditions that stimulate
and sustain this process are:
1. The child becomes an inquirer
when he is faced by some event or situation that challenges his idea of the universe. Such discrepant events create dissonance within the cognitive systems of
the perceiver. They also provide a focal
point for the initiation of the inquiry
process and an initial motivation to overcome the inertia of complacency-the
complacency that grows out of the satisfaction of one's existing state of knowledge. Unless one can be pried loose from
a tenacious hold on this knowledge as the
absolute truth, conceptual reorganization
and expansion are not possible.
2. Inquiry can occur only in a climate
that affords freedom for the student to
gather data and to build and test theories
in his own way. Optimal learning occurs
under learning conditions that are optimal for the individual learner. Unless
the learner can influence these conditions
at least to the extent of shaping his own
290
learning program, he will be led through
a program engineered by external agents;
e.g., teachers. Such agents can rarely
be as aware of the cognitive needs of
the learner as the learner himself.
3. Even the freedom to inquire cannot
sustain inquiry if the learner has no
access to data, no opportunity to test his
ideas against empirical events. Inquiry
demands an environment that responds
to probes, that yields data on demand.
The response is the reward for probing.
It is well established that, given a thoroughly responsive environment, children
continue probing even in the absence of
closure or discovery. There is certainly
a case for a motivation inherent in data
gathering and information processing.
The inquiring child need not be entirely on his own. It would be foolish
to deprive the child of guidance and support of teachers, scholars, and whatever
other sources of knowledge can be made
available in a meaningful way. There
is no purpose in requiring a child to
discover everything for himself.
Inquiry is an attitude toward learning
and a philosophy of education. The central values are the open mind and the
autonomous probing of the learner. If
the teacher would promote inquiry, he
must provide the child with problems
to focus upon, give him opportunities to
theorize and test his theories, and help
him with road maps that suggest better
theories and more productive strategies
of investigation. Detrimental to inquiry
is the belief that knowledge is absolute,
that it must be passed down to the student
from authorities and that the student
must accept it as the truth. Inquiry cannot survive in a setting where these
CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
beliefs are prevalent. The teacher who
would preserve the curiosity and intellectual activity of his pupils must provide
a climate where inquiry can flourish.
Once a child has passed through the portal
from being the consumer of knowledge
into the realm of being a producer of it,
he is not content to go back.
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Varied Ways To Stimulate Inquiry
There are countless ways in which a
teacher can create conditions which stimulate and sustain inquiry in the classroom. One of these is simply to introduce
an event which is strange and difficult for
the children to understand or explain.
This is done without comment or explanation. If the children are encouraged to
speculate about the event, there will
almost always be an immediate response.
For example, in the area of science, a
teacher could take a sheet of paper, hold
it up in front of his face and blow over
the top of it. The effect of doing this
is to cause the paper to rise rather than
fall. Children not familiar with this
phenomenon and even those who have
seen it happen before are generally unable to explain it. If at this point the
children are encouraged to bring forth
their theories and if their ideas are accepted without critical comment, the
children feel the freedom to toss their
thoughts and hypotheses into the arena
of ideas for the rest of the group to
consider.
Taking the inquiry another step, the
teacher can provide an opportunity for
the children to experiment by varying
the conditions.
FEBRUARY 1965
The teacher asks: "What happens if
you blow straight down on the paper
rather than directly over the top?"
"What happens if you blow harder or
with less force?" As the children perform a variety of manipulations and ask
a range of new questions, many will
modify their original theories. Often the
operations performed by one child will
be aimed at testing the theories formulated by another.
It is most important for the teacher
to avoid pronouncing a judgment upon
what the children say. If they sense that
their contributions are being evaluated,
they respond only when they feel sure of
the "correctness" of what they are saying. This keeps them from taking risks
and trying out ideas that seem "leapy"
and remote.
It is important that the teacher encourage two kinds of participation: generating theories and gathering information as a means of testing the theories
to see if they stand up in the face of
reality.
Inquiry can be free and genuine only
if each child is allowed to come to grips
with the problem events in his own terms.
If children are expected to accept the
teacher's theories and explanations, any
investigation they undertake is simply
a matter of going through the motions
of inquiry. If the teacher has an openended point of view about knowledge and
allows the children to have this point of
view too, there is no end to the creative
thinking that a discrepant event will
produce in the classroom.
291