Mr Toerien writes...
As Year 9 students shift their focus from reading for engagement and dialogue with texts in English to reading for information and meaning in texts, it is worth pausing to remind ourselves where we are in this particular Heroic Inquiry journey.
A distinguishing feature of a Signature Work is an inquiry-based exploration of a significant problem or question that the student has personally identified and defined. As the first step towards personally identifying and defining a significant problem or question is a daunting step, we framed the Signature Work through the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), because the SDGs by their very nature confront students with a broad range of authentic problems and questions.
However, in orienting students towards a problem or question framed within an SDG, the Signature Work had to do so in such a way that students could see "what will be as filled with possibility,"* and would be empowered to begin fashioning reality from that possibility. Out of this, the theme of the Year 9 Signature Work inquiry emerged:
The Future Needs You: Living Well in a World Worth Living in.**
Because inquiry increasingly unfolds in a digital environment, exploratory reading for engagement and dialogue with texts in English was based on work being done in Computing on finding and working with reliable digital information about the SDGs and their associated Targets, for example in databases and on websites.
This initial focus on the SDGs established a meaningful curricular link with work then being done on development in Geography, and also, importantly, with the themes of Catholic Social Teaching.
This brings us to what is for me one of the highlights of the Year 9 Signature Work, which is developing our physical and virtual collections in response to the personal shape that the students are beginning to give to their individual inquiries (see below for a partial snapshot).
Watching students thoughtfully reading brought to mind Douglas Knight's observation on the second great function of a library, which is less a place than an encounter
which allows and encourages the development, the extension of ideas -- not their passive absorption, but their active generation. Here our image of the conventional reading-room may interfere. We picture a hundred silent, inert figures, and forget that each is making some active reckoning with all that he thought to be true before he confronted a new range of ideas or conditions. He may be more active at that quiet moment, in fact, than at any other time in his life. The technical means of his encounter may be a record, a tape, a film, a print-out or -- most radical of all -- a book. Libraries are not bounded by means; they will and should employ any means to achieve their ends. (p. viii)***
I conclude with our Portrait of an Engaged and Empowered Inquirer at Year 9 , which captures something of who our students are in the process of becoming (see here for Years 3, 6 and 13).
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*Taken from Neil Postman’s argument for “non-trivial schooling,” which “can provide a point of view from which what is [reality] can be seen clearly, what was as a living present, and what will be as filled with possibility” (p. x) in Postman, N. (1996). The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York, NY: Random House.
**"Living Well in a World Worth Living in" is a translation of the aboriginal Wiradjuri phrase, Yindyamarra Winhanganha.
***Knight, D. M. (1968). Library Services for the Nation's Needs: Toward Fulfillment of a National Policy. Washington, DC: US Office of Education.
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