This project considers how inquiry skills are developed by creating classroom conditions whereby students have the opportunity to pose questions, make decisions, synthesise and analyse information and engage in critical thinking about geographical knowledge. By filming students undertaking a geography sequence using inquiry-based learning, we investigated the teacher’s role when conducting an inquiry. The analysis examines how the teacher navigates the role of both guiding students yet also enabling students’ own decision-making and questioning, which are essential elements of the inquiry process.

The major research question for this study is:

1. What role do teachers undertake when supporting students during inquiry-based learning in Geography?

Developing young people’s ability to inquire, using disciplinary frameworks complements the development and application of disciplinary knowledge. The purpose of including student-centred inquiry in instructional practices is important for developing students’ skills to find and synthesise new information to build understanding. Michael Young (2014a; 2014b) argues that teaching students how to inquire is part of the development of powerful knowledge.

Alaric Maude (2018) builds on Young’s position maintaining that one form of powerful knowledge that can be supported in the curriculum is ‘knowledge that gives students some power over their own geographical knowledge.’ (p.183). When a student can go beyond using knowledge to know how to find it and to evaluate it’s worth, this knowledge is powerful because it ‘enables students to gather knowledge independently of the dominant sources of information’ (Bouwmans & Beneker, 2018, p.448).

There are various inquiry-based planning models, teaching and learning approaches and pedagogies that complement the inquiry-based curriculum. In short, ‘what teachers do’ and ‘what students do’ and ‘how this matters’ is under-researched.  By engaging in disciplinary practices of inquiry, students learn to formulate disciplinary questions, how to find, connect and interpret data to build knowledge. This matters in a 21st-century curriculum because expanding students’ capacity to be independent thinkers will enable them to flourish in a complex world which is changing rapidly (Schleicher, 2012). However, the extent to which these approaches promote the transferability of key inquiry skills needs further investigation. In particular, industry explicitly wants graduates that can effectively use team-based inquiry skills, and be able to negotiate collaborative problem-solving drawing on higher order thinking skills (Kuisma, 2018). These skills have been recognised at the policy level and are explicit in the mandated curriculum in many jurisdictions and are required to be assessed. 

This project is based on the conceptual approach of ‘complementary accounts’ (Clarke, Keitel & Shimizu, 2006) whereby videos of experienced classroom teachers conducting an inquiry-based learning experience were recorded in order to study how teachers and students negotiate and articulate an inquiry. This qualitative research approach is distinguished from other approaches to inquiry research by (i) the nature of the data collection procedures, leading to the construction of ‘integrated data sets’ combining videotape and interview data (utilising a laboratory classroom); (ii) the inclusion of the reflective voice of participant students and teachers in the data set; and (iii) an analytical approach that utilises a research team with complementary but diverse areas of expertise to carry out analysis of the data. Participants and methods In total, 68 students and 3 teachers participated in this research project, and the average age of the adolescents who participated was 14 years and the class sizes varied from 22 to 23 students. Three geography classes from 2 schools in the Metropolitan region of Melbourne participated in this study; one year seven class, one year eight class and one year nine class. One year 9 teacher designed a rich inquiry-based task that required students to create a plan to redesign a local park that would meet the needs of the local community. All teachers implemented the same task which was adapted in order to cater to the learning needs of the students depending on their year level. As part of the task, the teacher and students visited the park on the way to the university and spent the rest of the day collaboratively creating their proposal in groups of about four students. The students presented their planning and a new design for the park at the end of the day. The classes were video-recorded in the purpose-built SLRC laboratory classroom. Work samples that were produced during the day were photographed or scanned. Researchers were able to observe the lesson through a one-way mirror and created lesson tables in real time for each class. Teacher interviews were conducted after the lessons and were transcribed. All data were de-identified to protect the anonymity of participants. Analysis approaches Inductive analysis was used to generate coding schemes for video data, semi-structured interviews and document analysis (Merriam, 2016). Thematic coding of the key activities that the teacher engaged in during the lessons was analysed using Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software.

The preliminary findings show that the role of the teacher when facilitating inquiry-based learning is multi-faceted and remarkably complex. The Japanese pedagogical approach of ‘Kikan Shido’ – that can be directly translated into English as ‘Between Desks Instruction’ – was a useful observation tool for determining the guidance provided by the teacher. Initially, an inductive framework was developed and subsequently compared with a framework developed by Xu, O'Keefe, & Clarke (2006) that categorised the functions of Kikan Shido as ‘Monitoring’, ‘Guiding’, ‘Organising’ and ‘Social Talk’. Inductive video analyses revealed that within these broad categories, teachers engaged in various interactions with students to support inquiry. For example, when ‘Guiding’, the strategies used by the teacher were: - Guiding through questioning (including extending responses, understanding practicalities and prompting new ideas) - Encouraging - Giving feedback, advice, instruction - Redirecting student behaviour - Responding to the student The analysis shows that expert teachers frequently use a range of highly sophisticated and responsive strategies in an inquiry-based classroom. These are not random events but are carefully orchestrated ‘in the moment’ interventions that are targeted to meet the needs of students and their progression through the task. Furthermore, the dichotomy of explicit instruction and inquiry-based learning as approaches at opposite ends of a continuum is not an accurate representation of what occurs in practice. Inquiry-based learning provides a framework for an investigation, but within this framework, a range of pedagogies are utilised, including explicit instruction. Implementing inquiry-based curriculum in the classroom requires a highly skilled teacher that is acutely aware of students’ zone of proximal development and group cognition in order to know when to ‘connect’ with students (listen, respond, guide, direct and reflect) and when to ‘disconnect’ (walk away and allow the students the time and space to engage in problem solving and reasoning together).

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