Lauer's "Writing as Inquiry"

Lauer, Janice M. “Writing as Inquiry: Some Questions for Teachers.” College Composition and Communication. 33.1 (1982): 89-93.

First, a note:

I began this series of blog posts hoping to discover more about how inquiry as a pedagogical framework figures into the teaching English.  I have been surprised by the paucity of related articles (and as a result am still hoping to find the magical term that is being used in English studies to talk about this concept—because surely people have talked about it more than it appears!).  Thus, I was pleased to find this (albeit brief) 1982 article exciting and full of promise.  But then Google Scholar revealed that only 19 articles cite it, and many of those are irrelevant or published in less prominent journals.  I find myself back where I was, wondering why inquiry has been discussed so little in our field, or only as a part of larger constructs such as critical pedagogy.  It may be that I must do as Janice Lauer did and venture outside our field to learn about inquiry and then draw my own connections to the English classroom.  

Second, a summary and review:

Lauer offers a sort of survey in which she summarizes findings and theories related to inquiry, considers them from a compositionist's perspective, and then offers a number of questions that emerge from them for instructors in our field.  The thinkers whose work she surveys include Lonergan, Piaget, Festinger, Rothenburg, Young, and Wallas.  Lauer’s questions are too numerous to list here, but I will review a few of the most interesting (which also touch on some of her others). 

First, any teacher who hopes to inspire students to have questions, pursue them, and have insights has wondered “What creates the tension of inquiry for the writer? What ‘inner conditions’ are conducive to insight?” (90).  These seem the most universal and pressing questions for instructors of captive audiences—students enrolled in required courses.  If their own interest didn’t land them in our classrooms, how do we motivate often apathetic students to have questions, to think beyond the surface, to wonder?  And if they do produce a rich question or develop the “tension of inquiry,” how can we create an environment that somehow helps them to achieve the states of incubation, flow, and so on that allow people to have insights?  In short, how can we use artificial means to elicit the genuine?

Second, inquiry raises the question of how instructors can balance opportunities for students to pursue, attempt, personalize, and even fail with opportunities for students to learn by following processes and structures that we already know to support success.  In my own practice, I have experimented at both ends of this scale, finding great success at times (invariably with motivated, high-achieving, and/or more developed students) but also struggling as my problem-solving attempts reveal that both structured and unstructured approaches seem about equally successful and disastrous (especially with more diverse, less developed, and less internally motivated classes…i.e., ninth-graders).

Due to its brevity, Lauer’s article does not give me the sense that I have grasped what Lonergan et al. have written, but it does give me a clear sense of where I could go next in pursuit of either deeper discussions of inquiry outside our field or related terms that might lead me to richer caches within our field.