The document summarizes and reflects on two readings about inquiry-based English instruction from an educational perspective. The author notes that the readings advocate for a critical inquiry stance in literacy education that disrupts common assumptions, examines multiple viewpoints on sociopolitical issues, and promotes social justice. The author believes this aligns with critical literacy and sees value in engaging students in constructing meaning through investigating complex topics and challenging prevailing views. Overall, the reflections support adopting an inquiry-based approach in the classroom to empower students and make education more meaningful.

1. Buffy Hamilton
READ 8100
Response to Beach and Myers Readings
Inquiry-Based English Instruction
October 26, 2002
Focus Question: Do the readings reflect an inquiry stance or a critical inquiry
stance?
As I pulled the xeroxed copies of this week’s readings, I was pleasantly surprised to
realize that these chapters came from a book that I just ordered last week! After
reading the first two chapters, I am looking forward to continuing the reading of this
text!
Chapter 1
Before I began reading this week’s chapters, I revisited an article from Language Arts
that I read earlier this semester about critical literacy in the classroom. Lewison, Flint,
and Van Sluys define four dimensions of critical literacy:
• disrupting the commonplace
• interrogating multiple viewpoints
• focusing on sociopolitical issues
• taking action and promoting social justice (p. 382, 2002).
After reading Chapters 1 and 2, I would say that the Beach and Myers framework is
definitely working from a critical inquiry stance to literacy.
The idea of constructing social worlds and looking at how those social worlds intersect
with language, literature, and various kinds of texts reminded me of a book I read last
summer in my Writing Pedagogies course by Anne Haas Dyson; that text focused on the
intersection of children’s “unofficial” world and the “world of school” and how those
world shaped young children’s literacies. Like the worlds of the children in that text,
the worlds of children today are “…multiple and often overlapping social worlds” that are
“not fixed and objective” (p. 1). This first chapter focuses on how social worlds are
socially constructed and are dynamic; in many ways, this idea of social worlds made me
think of “transactions” and Bakhtin’s “dialogic threads” that constantly shape our
utterances. Because students are “…critiquing these constructions and representations
with an eye toward proposing changes in these worlds” (p. 4), I feel this framework
presented meets the four dimensions of critical literacy as students are inquiring through
a self-interrogative lens. Assumptions are disrupted and students are challenged to
examine multiple perspectives; this work could lead to action for social justice. At the
same time, this work fits in with an inquiry stance because students constantly
“negotiate and construct” meaning and their precepts of the social worlds they are
exploring (p. 6).

2. In this same chapter, Beach and Myers discuss the traditional English curriculum, which
we discussed at great length last summer in Dr. St. Pierre’s Language and Learning
course. As you all know, I have expressed great frustration with what I perceive to be a
stagnant and inflexible English curriculum in my district (and the state of Georgia in
general, which will become more prescribed if the current testing frenzy continues). In
this kind of curriculum and learning environment, “Language is treated as capable of
precision where everyone struggles to make texts have exact and single meanings”(p.7).
This stance, of course, goes completely against Rosenblatt and transactional theories,
and I find this traditional approach distressing and disturbing. Students have no
invested interest in their learning and many students are marginalized. On the other
hand, the “metaphoric” approach echoes the readings of Vygotsky in which “…language
meanings are invented in social interaction instead of simply shuttled between
minds”(p.7). Words and thoughts are affected by our social transactions.
On p. 9, I thought of Freire and hooks as the authors examined traditional tracking
practices that are often based on traditional language assessments administered
through English classrooms; this also reminded of last week’s discussion in class in
which we pondered whether educational practices at the federal, state, and local levels
are well-intended but misguided, or whether they are intended to perpetuate the
mainstream culture and “keep people in their place”. Another statement that echoed
some of last week’s discussion about lack of inquiry even at the college level asserted,
“Even the curriculum of higher education today is driven largely by the demands of the
workplace, rather than the demands of knowledge generation through inquiry and
critique”(p.9).
Chapter 2
I especially liked the six inquiry strategies that Beach and Myers identified at the
beginning of the chapter; this list reminded me of the ones we generated as a class at
the beginning of the semester when we brainstormed what engaged learning looked like
as well the activity in which we looked at classroom vignettes and thought about what
elements of inquiry existed in those vignettes.
On p. 18, Beach and Myers state, “The six inquiry strategies of a social worlds
curriculum engage the student in a ‘problem-based’ English curriculum.” This model
immediately made me think of Freire and his advocating of a problem-based framework
for education. In this framework, students are involved in a never-ending cycle of
inquiry. Like Dr. Fecho’s work, this work involves a degree of threat; as the authors
point out that “Students also need to be willing to study difficult or controversial issues.
And in doing so, they need to be open to challenging the status quo”(p. 21). Here,
discourses are disrupted and students interrogate assumptions. Social and political
issues come into play, and students, if transformed, may be moved to action for social
justice. The practice-oriented model reflects a critical inquiry stance on literacy.

3. Significant/Memorable Quote
From page 24
“To seek a construct of a different practice of literacy in school classrooms, a different
school world of knowing, a different way of being and relating to other and the world, is
to work against a significant cultural ideology played out in our everyday interactions
with each other, the media and the material objects of our social worlds. What is
probably the biggest irony, is that although this ideology school success is dominant,
what we remember most throughout our lives are the relationships we established with
the people we met I school and the knowledge we generated with them in valued activities
within and beyond the classroom walls.”
Essential Questions to Ask as Teacher (p.24)
• Why do we want to explore this world?
• How are texts used in this social world?
• What inquiry strategies will we use to help us better understand how this social
world is constructed?
• What can literacy do for us and what do we want it to do in a social world?
Concluding Thoughts
After reading this, I cannot help but think that everything goes back to what we value as
teachers and learners. The proposed framework and posed questions get at the heart
of “What is the purpose of education?” and whether or not those purposes apply to
everyone, not just a select group. I think of the poignant question Sharon Murphy
posed to us last week: “If our classrooms are a second text, what does yours say?” I
am finding myself thinking long and hard about all these issues and questions as I try to
expand the boundaries that outside influences try to impose upon my students and me.
I am also glad that I am in this course; had I read this book without being in this
course, I honestly don’t think I would have had a clue at what these authors are getting
at when they talk about “ a model for inquiry-based English instruction”; I desperately
want to continue to be immersed in a classroom with an inquiry stance! I see the
experiences in this course as the beginning of a new journey as I explore what it means
to take an inquiry stance on literacy a teacher and learner, and I cannot wait to see
where it leads!
Lewison, M., Flint, A., and Van Sluys, K. (2002). Taking on critical literacy: The journey
of newcomers and novices. Language Arts, 79, 382-392. Retrieved September 12,
2002 from http://www.ncte.org/pdfs/subscribers-only/la/0795-may02/LA0795Taking.pdf