Today’s guest lecture by Trevor Mackenzie got me inspired to start thinking about ways I could integrate inquiry projects into my English classroom.
I’ll start with some key takeaways from Trevor’s talk. Firstly, I think his idea of conference-style feedback is a must-integrate for humanities teachers. I know that most students don’t read written feedback, especially when it is accompanied by a grade. It is essentially a waste of our time, then, to give written feedback on English assignments. It is intensely laborious to give written feedback on assignments, as well! This makes it even more of a shame to waste that work done on our side. Most traditional English classes are structured in such a way that once your grade is assigned for a project, it isn’t going to change, and so there isn’t much point in looking at the feedback. When a class is broken up into summative assessments at the end of each unit which are not tied to a greater year-end learning goal, there is even less point in reading feedback. I think the solution is to avoid giving grades for as long as possible, and treat the year-end assessment and accompanying grading conference as your main end goal that the students are consistently working towards. If you have to assign and publish grades throughout the semester, you can deal with this by making them amendable in relation to your final project and progress, as discussed in your year-end conference. This year end assessment could be an inquiry project, and the students’ grade for the class would assess their progress throughout the semester and their work on their inquiry project. This grade could be decided upon in conference, with preparation on the side of the student. In order to make sure the inquiry is on task regarding English curriculum, there could exist a set of curricular topics that the projects must integrate. Alternatively, there could be a set of three mini inquiries, with a culminative assessment and reflection of them at the end, where course themes are parsed and expanded upon across the three projects, making connections between them and reflecting on points of divergence or similarity. Each mini-inquiry project would be connected to an ascribed learning theme relevant to the English teacher’s chosen focus curriculum.
One specific idea I had regarding expanding English curriculum to a host of different learning styles and interests is poetry studies based on the physicality and shapes of poetry. I think it would be interesting and fun to play with experimental poetry like poetry that is written into shapes, or block poetry, or found poetry, or poetry analysis that focuses on the shapes of words rather than the meanings the represent. This unit might offset a unit of conventional close readings and analysis. There are all sorts of fun experimental poetry sources to draw upon- a favourite of mine is Decomp by Stephen Collis Jordan Scott. These poets took copies of Darwin’s Origins of Species and let them decompose in nature, in varying ecosystems. They then treated the product as poetry. Here, the art lies in the transformation and the creative engagement with the text and environment- the poetry is the process rather more than the end product, though the end product is a testament and symbol of the process. This is a resonant metaphor for our discussions of inquiry-based learning.
