Character-eyes - Story-driven Inquiry from a Character's Viewpoint

Inquiry-based learning encourages students to pose questions, find and interpret multiple pieces of evidence and to present conclusions in a coherent presentation. The goal of this research is to demonstrate that narrative and story can support inquiry learning on a number of different levels. Characters who undertake familiar inquiry processes, such as a detective or an investigative journalist, can act as a focus around which an inquiry task can be conducted and a story can be constructed. These characters are intended to support a learner by helping them to understand the sorts of activities they may need to do in their own inquiry. More functional aspects of narrative can also underpin the process of the inquiry and assist a learner in understanding important relationships between facts. Finally, parallels between narrative structure and an inquiry process can be exploited to support a learner through the different stages of inquiry and provide help in producing the output and constructing a story, based on the conclusions of the task.