Inquiry-based learning is one approach to improving the quality of undergraduate education by moving toward more student-directed, interactive methods of learning while focusing on learning how to learn. This paper deals with a missing component in the inquiry-related literature-the extra-pedagogical challenges of introducing and maintaining inquiry-based learning in the curriculum. Based in the collective experience of McMaster University, a mid-size Canadian university that has been a pioneer in inquiry pedagogy, the paper describes the challenges administrators faced in supporting the introduction of inquiry-based learning as components of traditional courses, as inquirybased courses, and as inquiry-based degree programs. Derived from interviews, the paper presents a series of strategies and lessons for introducing and maintaining inquiry pedagogy in the curriculum. These lessons will be broadly useful to administrators, curriculum designers and faculty developers and should be widely applicable to institutes of higher education.
This article reviews how and why the authors have used the cross-cultural simulation BAFA BAFA in a 1styear social sciences inquiry course on social identity. The article discusses modifications made to Shirts’s original script for BAFA BAFA, how the authors conduct the postsimulation debriefing, key aspects of the student-written reflection of the simulation, and research results on how students perceive and rate BAFA BAFA relative to their learning. Students enrolled in the course find the simulation to be important to various aspects of their learning, including helping them to understand cultural diversity. This is particularly true for students who score highly on measures of deep learning, that is, the ability to connect course content with meanings in other situations and experiences in reflective ways.
This chapter describes the assumptions and principles for good practice based on case studies at a research‐intensive university in which several departments introduced curriculum change through a novel departmental grants program.
There are unique moments in curriculum development when an opportunity for a fresh start or a major turn in design fl eetingly presents itself. These moments opened up in different locations across McMaster University at different times and eventually led to several quite different initiatives in inquiry-guided learning (IGL). Well-travelled pedagogical ideas combined with administrative openings and faculty interest to foster IGL within and across disciplines. Bell's work on general education (Bell, 1966), along with the ideas of self-directed learning described by Knowles (1975) and Candy (1991), were infl uential during the early stages of IGL. Pockets of experimentation in collaborative self-directed learning emerged across the campus over a thirty-year period. An institutional culture that prized risk taking and innovation nurtured these experiments.But innovation does not occur in a vacuum. Traditional teaching methods that emphasized disciplinary content, along with a reward system that emphasized research over teaching, posed significant challenges. And administrators had to be convinced that it was worthwhile to allocate budget items to ill-defi ned pedagogical initiatives. In this chapter, we discuss some of the enabling factors that helped to encourage early experimentation in IGL and push it toward greater institutionalization, as well as some of the challenges and obstacles that had to be overcome (see Figure 9.1). Although higher education institutions are diverse, each with their unique Over the past thirty years, inquiry-guided learning has fl ourished at McMaster University. In this chapter, we discuss some of the enabling factors that helped to encourage early experimentation in inquiry-guided learning and push it toward greater institutionalization as well as some of the challenges and obstacles that had to be overcome.
Scholarship is the heart of academic work. Recognizing this the Carnegie report (Boyer, 1990) urges universities to extend the definition of scholarship to include application, teaching, and integration, as well as discovery, thereby making it possible to value all academic work. Although this inclusive view of scholarship holds promise, questions remain concerning the scholarship of teaching and how such scholarship differs from the activities which presently comprise teaching. How would scholarship be identified with teaching, enhance practices, and foster the development of teaching? These questions are addressed, examples given of teaching scholarship, and of institutional policies which support it. The enhancement of teaching, as it meets scholarship's criteria, is discussed.
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