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Educational consultant Kath Murdoch discusses inquiry-based approaches to teaching History in primary school with HTAV's Executive Officer Deb Hull.
You're working on the implementation of an inquiry approach to teaching and learning with a wide variety of schools and teachers. Are you finding that inquiry learning is already in place, or are you still sometimes finding places where it's not part of the teaching approach?
I have partnered with most of these schools for many years, so they have already engaged, but I am aware that many schools are not using this approach or might be working in ways that I associate with what we once called 'integrated curriculum' back in the nineties, and haven't moved on from that. But the schools I work with are really taking the approach forward and treating it in a more contemporary way. I don't know how you properly attend to the achievement standards in the Humanities and Science without using an inquiry-based stance because of the emphasis on questioning that's so much a part of those curricula.
That's interesting because, in History, inquiry activities might be the only place where students first and sometimes only get a chance to develop their own questions.
It's often the first thing that people identify when I ask, 'What do you think inquiry learning is all about?' An overly simplistic view of inquiry is it's where you ask children, 'What would you like to know about? What questions do you have? All right, off you go and research those questions.' But most of the teachers who I work with understand that the role of student-generated questions is actually a sophisticated element of inquiry that extends throughout the process. It's often the teacher initially driving the learning through some compelling questions connected to the concepts they're exploring. And then, through that process of investigating as a group, there's enough background understanding built to say to students, 'Now, on the basis of this, what else are you wondering? What are the things that have intrigued you?' And then they take that investigation further.
The questions students construct will depend on what you're investigating and the kind of information that you're getting, so we need to include in our History teaching some exploration of how...