This project is a complicated work for me. It is my first time to design the inquiry project with so many details of process, teaching contents and approaches. Hence, there were lots of challenges for me. At the beginning, I could not find a suitable topic for my inquiry project. I never taught students who were older than 10 years old when I worked in my country so I could only seek the appropriate teaching contents in a narrow area. I knew nothing about the BC curriculum and it took me much time to be familiar with it. I revised my topic exploration over and over again and finally I decided to adopt “multiculturalism” as my teaching topic mainly through indigenous traditions.
The successful experience I felt was the teacher’s affirmation of my topic and brainstorm. And then, I was clearer about the focus on teaching contents and the methods to have practice. I spent much time on modifying my project design according to teacher’s suggestions and when I finished my lesson demonstration plan, I was more confident about my design. I’m also glad that my group members gave me the useful advices for my lesson demonstration plan, which assisted me to make my teaching activities more logical, reasonable and practical. I felt successful when the classmates replied to me with the clear understandings of my project design and their comments helped me improve it.
I have a question about my inquiry project. Actually, my project design was limited because I just only have indigenous traditions teaching to study multiculturalism. Certainly, it is just a start learning of multiculturalism. However, I don’t know how to design a one year long project or even longer one. I saw that some of my classmates had a one year long project design. So amazing!
Besides, many classmates have an interdisciplinary design in their project. Thus, if I did this project design again, I would apply one more discipline as well such as English Language Arts.
I learned a lot about the inquiry pedagogy through this project design. The places for inquiry are flexible. Study should not be limited in the classroom so I adopted outdoor education (Maltais, 2020) to improve students’ physical and mental well-being. The first workshop mainly employed meaningful interactions like identity, values, beliefs, language sharing, discussion, debate and reflection on social diversity and multiculturalism. Other three workshops about indigenous traditions learning used teaching concepts in walking curriculum (Judson, 2018) and place-based pedagogy (David, 2013), to create a more engagement learning environment (Friesen & Scott, 2013). Storytelling, strongly advocated by indigenous education, is also frequently utilized, to learn the significance of doing hand drum, the history of pine needle basket and the meaning of traditional plants. Humanity design can be seen in my project design, which reflects the concepts of deign thinking (Clark, 2020; Quinn, Bartlett, McNeil & Miner, 2018). Students like going outside, drawing and doing handmade art. In this project, students can learn indigenous traditions on a grass ground, in local community and in a garden. Students present their understandings of learning contents through drawing. They learn pine needle basket by making it with group members. Parents want their children to be physically and mentally healthy when their children acquire knowledge. Those outdoor learning activities conducted in project meets parents’ expectation.
Before I attended this course, my initial understanding of inquiry meant asking questions. We needed to see the same thing from different angles because things were complicated and there might be many possibilities and changes would probably happen. Hence, I thought we should ask ourselves questions to critically think about something in terms of inquiry. But after I read many resources of inquiry pedagogy and according to what I learned in class with teacher and peers, I learned that inquiry-based pedagogy requires teachers and students study together with meaningful interactions like discussion, storytelling, problem-solving and field practice through digital technologies, multiple media and learning activities (Buckner& Kim, 2014; Khalaf, 2018) to produce sophisticated and deeper understanding of knowledge (Justice, Rice, Roy, Hudspith & Jenkins, 2009). I thought assessment was at the end of learning process. But after I read the article in class, I realized that assessment should be an ongoing task during the teaching process. Teachers discover some difficulties and problems that students encounter and then adjust teaching strategies appropriately according the ongoing assessment. Assessment should be limited in paper test. Comprehensive assessment like class performances and work created during learning should also be involved. Compliments are suggested instead of punishments.
After the class and project design, I appreciate the inquiry pedagogy but I’m wondering how we can effectively apply inquiry in teaching. Even though, I adopt some inquiry approaches in my project design, I still feel that my teaching plans are not completely separated from traditional teaching method. I prefer the immersed learning. I’m thinking about how to combine inquiry with immersed learning naturally. In terms of technology used in inquiry process, I would like to utilize “virtual reality” in teaching. Considering time or place limit, students and teachers might not have chances to go to a real place to have inquiry study and immersed learning, so virtual reality is a good way to adopt to create engaged learning environment.