ACTIVE LEARNING THROUGH INQUIRY AT THE WORKSHOP CENTER

Professor Hubert Dyasi, Director
The Workshop Center

The world which all of us know directly and experience daily is full of phenomena - natural as well as man-made. There are rivers, lakes, trees, grass, airplanes, cars, buildings, mountains, day and night, light and shadows, sounds, rain, snow, winds, and many, many other items; these phenomena are also the focus of scientific inquiry. In a rich variety of ways, these phenomena have attributes, such as dimension, mass, and density, that can be observed and documented, described in words or numbers, pictorially, and in other ways. They can also be acted upon to reveal additional aspects that are not otherwise observable. Through the practice of research-based scientific inquiry, we come to understand phenomena and create significant scientific knowledge and intellectual models to explain, predict, and help manipulate their behavior. Active learning that focuses on the scientific understanding of these phenomena can be an invaluable educational strategy.

It is from the perspective of active learning that the Workshop Center has built its education of undergraduates and elementary and middle-school teachers in scientific inquiry. Active learning at the Center means that students play an active role in the learning of all aspects of science inquiry practice: they learn to generate productive, investigable questions that can lead to demonstrable designs and verifiable answers by themselves engaging in these aspects. Questions are followed by students' first-hand investigations of phenomena; activities in this phase involve design and planning of investigations, use of science "tools", such as microscopes, measuring devices, and reference materials, as they collect and organize data.

Through direct engagement students learn to document their science inquiries fully. Documentation includes specification of questions raised and what prompted the questions; decisions about which ones to answer and why; procedures followed; materials
used, and in what ways; and data. A portion of one student's documentation reads as follows:

"Over the weekend I was changing the sheets at home. As I took off a pillow case a feather came out of the pillow. Ordinarily, I would have just thrown it away, but today I did not. I stopped, picked it up and went over to the window to get a better look at it. I pulled it a number of times between my fingers and noted the smoothness of its texture...I wondered whether goose down feathers were different from the one in my hand...The down feathers I found seemed very different than the pillow feather...The first thing I did on Monday morning at the Center was to find a magnifier and a microscope...I started to examine the down feather closely, first with a magnifier. Toward the center, near what I called the trunk, I could see that it looked meshed together. Toward the outside, a single branch had hairs on each side arranged symmetrically up its length [the document had diagrams at this point]...The texture appeared very smooth and soft. I wanted to get a better look so I decided to use the microscope. I used 100x magnification...Moving the mirror back and forth, I reflected bright light through the feather. I saw the most wonderful patterns. There appeared to be buds like those on tree branches..."

"I'll never forget it! Snakes slithering around glass tanks; gerbils and hamsters playing in tunnels and on wheels in their cages...prisms in the sun glittering a variety of colors; wet logs in the frame of a water table providing homes for many insects...musical instruments; a library rich with educational resources, and instructors, willing facilitators, engaging students in the active pursuit of knowledge."

"I became a learner in the same context as my future students. I explored, predicted, encountered problems, questioned why I was assigned to do certain work, and was amazed at the various outcomes...I became the type of learner I wanted my future students to be."

"My journey of interacting with the material, asking questions, looking for answers, refining questions and going on to other questions became a path that was, at times, circuitous and always productive. As I kept a journal and notes, I was able to reflect on my own learning. It was important that I kept a learning record so I could stand apart from it and reflect on how I was learning. I was amazed by the map of understanding that seemed to chart itself, yet I was making all of the decisions...the paths were engaging because they were mine; they made sense because I was asking the questions and gathering my own evidence to confirm or refute. What I learned at the loom [the student's area of investigation] I know for certain, and will know forever, because I determined the course, made my own discoveries, took my own blind alleys, and made my own mistakes. The content (science, mathematics, sociology) and the process of this learning are both deep and lasting."