While inquiry-based approaches to learning foster dispositions and motivations that are integral to the success of students in the digital age, there are realistic barriers to facilitating their implementation within contemporary Australian schools, particularly those in diverse metropolitan areas.
The substantial amount of time needed for collaboration between teachers and TLs, which is devoted increasingly to the analysis for data, marginalising time for building new frameworks and topics for inquiry is a significant obstacle.
In schools serving communities with diverse abilities and literacies, the priorities of literacy intervention programs will inevitably win out, so it is important to target opportunities to build on subjects where students have shown development and further foster these burgeoning skills through the broader field of guided inquiry.
Students in low performing schools are often acutely aware of their circumstances and the challenges of fostering dispositions toward learning as process rather than an outcome can be daunting. The CSU research cited by Shreeman & Fitzgerald (2019) where students expressed ‘Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it, and it will be over’. is dishearteningly familiar to teachers who are met with students that are over burdened by assessment geared towards the generation of data rather than stimulating intellectual growth of students.
I would advance the idea that students are not so much suffering from an overloaded curriculum as has been argued by many but rather by an over-crowded assessment schedule that increasingly attempts to fit in as many points of summative assessment as possible rather than allowing the time and space for meaningful formative assessment. It is essential that the formative feedback throughout the process of inquiry is documented and analysed with the same rigor as summative data collected through standardised testing and assessment.
Coombes (2009) has already suggested that many of the assumptions that information literacy skills are implicitly held by students simply by virtue of their age contradicts all theories of information-seeking behaviour which clearly identify cultural and educational contexts as affecting true competency. The logical conclusion for all educators then should be that there should be an even greater focus on supporting those in disadvantaged contexts in creating and accessing opportunities for learning through guided inquiry in the interest of equity.
There has to be a shift in the way that schools evaluate literacy that truly respects the 21st century capabilities afforded to Australian students. To sacrifice inquiry-based approaches to the generation of data geared to showcase predetermined metrics is to in fact widen the gap of exclusion in literacy in society and limiting the educational enjoyment of exploration that all, regardless of ability, merit access to.
References
Coombes, B. (2009, February). Generation Y : are they really digital natives or more like digital refugees? Synergy.
Sheerman, A. & FitzGerald, L. (2019). A reflection on Guided Inquiry, Scan, 38(4).