What is Inquiry & Why is it Valuable?
Along my journey as a teacher, I have discovered that inquiry requires me to find the courage to ask big questions that transform and stimulate my teaching practice. The process of inquiry allows us to expand our understandings of what makes for effective teaching practices. What makes teaching effective is highly subjective; and it is based upon living and teaching that is in alignment with our deepest personal and professional values. Inquiry and asking questions… sparks within us a catalyst that helps to create positive changes in our teaching environment. By continually changing our ways of thinking and seeing the world, we allow openings for new theories, ideas, and innovations to come in. In her article ‘What is inquiry?’ (2005), author Heesoon Bai suggests that by looking “…inwardly into one’s own thoughts and feelings, while facing the world” (p. 47) that our existential and metaphysical view of the world can change the way we see things. Inquiry pushes us to reach beyond what we know and see in the world in order to create a new way of approaching pedagogy. Yet even after we may succeed or fail as a teacher, we may still need to draw up new conclusions or probe further for more questions and answers. As teachers we are seekers of knowledge, and we delve into the knowable, the unknown, and the unknowable. The more we seek, the more we learn, and yet there still always exists more that is unknown to us. This insatiable thirst to know what is unknown can becomes a metaphysical drive for a teacher… to explore the mysteries of the pedagogical world. Yet even if inquiry is at times a compulsion it is a good one… a necessary process to unravel the programs and systems that hold the knowable pedagogical world together.