Language and the Inquiry-Oriented Curriculum

Public debate about the goals of education is often couched in terms of an opposition between, on the one hand, the need to transmit to all students the knowledge and skills that are culturally valued and, on the other, the responsibility to foster each individual student's potential and creativity. By contrast, my aim is to show that, when one adopts a social constructivist theory of learning and teaching-enacted through an inquiry-oriented curriculum-these goals, far from being in conflict, are found to be essentially complementary and interdependent. In the development and instantiation of this argument, my illustrative examples will be drawn mainly from observations of work on topics in science; however, I believe that the inquiry approach that is proposed here is of general applicability to all areas of the curriculum.

[1]  W. Harlen.  Science 5-13: A formative evaluation , 1975 .

[2]  Louise M. Rosenblatt,et al.  Writing and Reading the Transactional Theory , 1988 .

[3]  J. M. D. Meiklejohn,et al.  The Critique of Pure Reason , 2020, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

[4]  J. Lyons.  Language, meaning, and context , 1981 .

[5]  James Britton,et al.  Language and Learning , 1970 .

[6]  Luis C. Moll.  Vygotsky and Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology , 1991 .

[7]  J. Piaget.  The construction of reality in the child , 1954 .

[8]  P. Johnson-Laird,et al.  Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness , 1985 .

[9]  Elizabeth Sulzby,et al.  Emergent Literacy: Writing and Reading. Writing Research: Multidisciplinary Inquiries into the Nature of Writing Series. , 1986 .

[10]  P. Cobb,et al.  Discourse, mathematical thinking, and classroom practice. , 1993 .

[11]  M. Scardamalia,et al.  Text-Based and Knowledge Based Questioning by Children , 1992 .

[12]  P. D. Hurd.  New directions in teaching secondary school science , 1969 .

[13]  Yury M. Lotman,et al.  Text within a Text , 1988 .

[14]  S. Wasserman.  A Case for Social Studies , 1992 .

[15]  Douglas R. Barnes.  From communication to curriculum , 1976 .

[16]  F. Christie.  Pedagogical and Content Registers in a Writing Lesson. , 1991 .

[17]  R. Gagne.  The learning requirements for enquiry , 1963 .

[18]  J. Dewey.  The child and the curriculum , 1902 .

[19]  James Britton,et al.  Prospect and Retrospect: Selected Essays of James Britton , 1986 .

[20]  M. Scardamalia,et al.  The psychology of written composition , 1987 .

[21]  James Britton,et al.  Prospect and Retrospect: Selected Essays. , 1982 .

[22]  James Britton,et al.  The development of writing abilities (11-18) , 1975 .

[23]  D. Wood.  How Children Think and Learn , 1988 .

[24]  J. Bruner.  Toward a Theory of Instruction , 1966 .

[25]  Lev Vygotsky.  Mind in society , 1978 .

[26]  J. Lemke.  Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values , 1990 .

[27]  Gordon Wells,et al.  The Meaning Makers: Children Learning Language and Using Language to Learn. First Edition. , 1985 .

[28]  L. Resnick.  The 1987 Presidential Address Learning In School and Out , 1987 .

[29]  C. Geertz,et al.  The Interpretation of Cultures , 1973 .

[30]  Eleanor Duckworth.  "The having of wonderful ideas" & other essays on teaching & learning , 1987 .

[31]  Martin Hughes,et al.  Young Children Learning: Talking and Thinking At Home and At School , 1984 .

[32]  A. N. Leont’ev,et al.  Activity, consciousness, and personality , 1978 .

[33]  A. Koller,et al.  Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language , 1969 .

[34]  Gordon Wells,et al.  The Literate Potential of Collaborative Talk. , 1987 .

[35]  A. N. Leont’ev.  The Problem of Activity in Psychology , 1974 .

[36]  J. Dewey.  Experience and Education , 1938 .

[37]  L. Vygotsky.  Thinking and Speech , 1987 .

[38]  Gordon Wells,et al.  Constructing Knowledge Together: Classrooms as Centers of Inquiry and Literacy , 1992 .

[39]  Neil Mercer,et al.  Common Knowledge: The Development of Understanding in the Classroom , 1987 .

[40]  J. Bruner.  Actual minds, possible worlds , 1985 .

[41]  Nelson Goodman,et al.  Of Mind and Other Matters. , 1984 .