The Teacher as Guide: A conception of the inquiry teacher

Abstract

This article explains how teachers might navigate inquiry learning despite the experience of a constant tension between abandoning their students and controlling them. They do this by conceiving of themselves as guides who decide the path with students, not for them. I build on a conception of teaching as guiding from Burbules, and argue that inquiry teachers should take the particular stance of an expedition-educator (rather than the stance of either a tour-leader or an expedition-leader). They should guide students to make progress during co-inquiry, rather than leading them to follow the teacher’s agenda. This stance gives a heuristic they can use to balance control and abandonment in their pedagogical practice—they judge which pedagogical actions to take, and when, according to which actions are likely to help their students to engage in autonomous inquiry and hence learn to guide themselves. Students thus can learn to inquire by participating in an inquiry which is guided, but not controlled, by their teacher.

Keywords :

• inquiry teaching
• inquiry learning
• guide
• Burbules
• metaphor

Notes

1. This differs from the common theory of learning which states that students need to be acquainted with a body of knowledge and procedures before they can engage in independent research and inquiry. Young (1992, pp. 54–55) cites theorists such as R. S. Peters, R. F. Dearden, R. Spaemann and John Stuart Mill as advocating this theory.

2. This sort of educational tension has had widespread attention. Gregory (2003, p. 407) sees this as the tension between ‘leading too strongly, so that students abdicate their own intelligence, and leading too lightly, so that students’ growth is left undirected and their intelligence undisciplined’. Whitehead (1929, chap. 3) calls this ‘balancing the rhythmic claims for freedom and discipline’. Sprod attributes a version of the tension to Kant, expressed as the question: ‘How shall I cultivate freedom through force?’ (2001, p. 67). Lastly, Splitter and Sharp express the tension in the following way: ‘If the teacher approaches the inquiry with a strong sense of which conclusions (in the forms of beliefs and values) the community should reach, how can she still be impartial and fair-minded enough to guide it in following the inquiry “wherever it leads”? If on the other hand, she allows her students to engage in an open-ended inquiry, does she not put at risk her commitment to truth and right (correct) actions?’ (1995, p. 138).

3. For examples of well-developed theories of inquiry learning see Burbules (1993), or the Philosophy for Children literature, such as Lipman (2003).

4. For example, ‘guide’ is a common term for philosophy teachers: see Cam (1997, p. 5), Burbules’ writing about Wittgenstein (Burbules, 2008, p. 668), and the second quotation that begins this article (Nelson, 2004, p. 144).

5. Other possible names for the expedition-educator include expedition-promoter, producer, advisor, navigator, enabler and empowerer. Each of these highlights an important facet of the role of the expedition-educator, but they tend to mix the metaphor, be ‘clunky’ or have negative connotations.

6. See Freire (1993, p. 113), who raises a similar distinction between thinking for, thinking with and thinking about.

7. See Golding (2011, section 2.3) for more on inquiry-educating (called thinking-educating) and the contrasting outcome-leading approach.

8. See Golding (2011, pp. 367–368) for a different example which could be described as a mathematics teacher being an expedition-educator and taking an inquiry-educating stance. They inquire with their students even though they already know the answer.