This week we had the opportunity to hear from Jeff Hopkins, former Supernintendo superintendent of the Gulf Islands school district, and now head of the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII). Prior to speaking with Jeff we were given a glimpse into the structure and pedagogy run by PSII which is entirely based around the idea of ‘inquiry.’ PSII has clearly developed some very meaningful tools for facilitating investigation and learning by youth along with a culture that inculcates the intrinsic rewards of learning rather than relying on external praise or consequence to keep students on track.
Among the most valuable tools I have found was there means of transposing co-constructed, caring, and evolving criticism and assessment into the ministry mandated grade system. Evaluation to a particular standard in and of itself is not a bad thing, but the means by which it is done in mainstream educational structures – grading – is not something that actually helps this. Grading entirely forecloses on the ways in which people are constantly developing and conditions students into a competitive social relationship with their peers. Inquiry based learning and the assessment associated with it changes this into a moment of reflection and collaboration. It levels the playing field between teacher and student that allows for spaces of challenge and space for the student to exert their autonomy over the conditions of their learning and how it continues or changes course.
Something that does come to mind as potentially limiting in the way PSII runs inquiry-based learning however is its underlying philosophy of knowledge, its epistemology (a theory of how we can know what we know). At PSII students work with teachers to construct questions, figure out ways to refine those questions, devise ways of learning about those questions and work towards figuring them out or finding out how they only lead to more questions. This method makes space for a myriad number of investigative routes and encourages critical reflection on findings. In this way it replicates the scientific method of knowledge discovery. This method leans towards a positivist orientation, which means it is most concerned with questions of what is ‘objectively’ knowable (critiques of what makes something ‘objective’ are not hard to come by. I like the takes that philosophers Sandra Harding, Sara Ahmed, and of course old man Marx have myself). While in and of itself this can be very valuable, such as in the STEM fields, it is incomplete without a normative or critical counterbalance. Normative philosophical approaches begin to ask questions of whether or not the ‘objective’ realities we discovered ought to be the way they are. Critical theories such as Marxism or critical feminisms go further by unearthing the underlying social relations that may lead to why things are the way they are and what limits they put on our conceptions of reality.
While PSIIs method by no means excludes such philosophical approaches, it appears as though these are not in-built to their style. For this reason it is incumbent on teachers to bring such approaches to students and encourage their use in critical reflection and the construction of analysis and arguments. For example, Jeff recounted the story of a student who wanted to learn to run a business. While the approach used by the school certainly worked in terms of allowing the student to explore the necessities of management and business ownership, it does not immediately engage the student with arguments the push against the apparently ‘objective’ reality of business that they experienced. In this case the teachers need to facilitate the student’s critical reflection on a number of issues such as the power of institutions (like PSII itself) to help certain individuals get started (like getting them free rental space) running a business, while others, predominantly people of colour and those not already with spare capital do not get support. Even more central to this example is in questions of ethics and politics around business such as whether or not the wage labour system is just or if co-operative and horizontal organizations of enterprise should be investigated more.
Inquiry itself is a powerful pedagogical system, but because of the ideological presumptions of our world we need to be careful in its implementation especially when it concerns social science fields or social and political issues in general. Without careful facilitation of a critical philosophical orientation in inquiry, students findings may well reproduce existing social relations and leave vital critical thinking skills underutilized while simultaneously normalizing the idea that certain social arrangements are to be taken for granted and not investigated.