Communicating Curiosity

I wrote in my last post about encouraging curiosity and inquisitiveness in youth, and I find the fourth chapter of Barell’s Developing More Curious Minds particularly useful in helping students to identify and create “good” questions; however, the chapter grossly oversimplifies a major criterion: “A good question,” Barell writes, “reflects a genuine desire to find out, a deep feeling for wanting to know more than we already do” (p. 61).  So what do you do when you’re surrounded by seventeen-year-olds who’ve never been encouraged to ask questions?  Who’ve grown up in an educational system that, as Kathleen Nolan observes, “speaks to people’s fears” (Anyon, 2009, p. 43), a system from which many of our students have been pushed by mistrust and disrespect? 

We cannot talk about helping kids create curious questions without acknowledging an urban school’s culture, and more often than not, it is not a place where creativity and curiosity flourish.  Consider the attitude created in urban schools through the marked “shift away from a rehabilitative model [of discipline] to one focused on creating social order through the integration of systems, or institutions, rather than of individuals into civil society (Anyon, p. 42).  How is this helping to develop “more curious minds”?  What can we do about this?  While Barell doesn't address the issue of school climate at all in this chapter (hence my dissatisfaction with his oversimplification), his answer would likely be this:  “If we want our children to raise significant questions... we must model these kinds of concerns for them, and with some depth of feeling or passion” (p. 80).  OK, so I can do that, but what about when they step outside my classroom? What about when they walk the halls where “the implicit mission becomes one of penal management, and the prevailing themes become control, contestation, and more control” (Nolan, p. 37)?  Barell says that without trusting relationships in our lives, we are “isolated electrons, bouncing around all alone in some cosmic plasma” (p. 70).  Do leaders of urban schools understand that they are ultimately creating their own school’s failure when they refuse to listen to their students?  When they refuse to engage them in honest conversation?  

Our kids are in survival mode.  They rarely have a stable adult in their lives. They’ve been taught to distrust figures of authority.  It stands to reason all I get are blank looks by the time they get to me; who am I to try to elicit some curiosity?  They literally want me to tell them what they need to know so they can move on.  They have not been encouraged to value inquisitiveness, and that’s probably because they’ve not been taught that they are valuable.  I recently gave a handful of junior students a questionnaire, and nearly all of them checked the box marked “False” on the statement that read, “I feel useful to my school and community.”  How messed up is that?  We--all adults, whether in education or not--have seriously got to make some changes in our attitudes toward youth if we ever hope to turn this school failure epidemic around.  And the key?  Communication.  

Here’s a thought: Let’s engage youth in the dialogues we have about them.  Let’s give them a little input on how to deal with discipline or other school issues.  And let’s not just choose the kids who are at the top of their class; let’s hear the stories of the sophomore who’s already got two kids and the junior who’s 19 and sells marijuana to help his mother pay rent.  Let’s find out what will get them to want to come to school.  I appreciate the value--the necessity--of a “good” question, but let’s not pretend that our students aren’t asking themselves how they’re simply going to survive today.

References

Anyon, J., Dumas, M.J., Linville, D., Noland, K. Perez, M., Tuck, E., & Weiss, J. (2009). Theory and educational research: 

             Toward crticial social explanation. New York: Routledge.

Barell, J. (2003). Developing curious minds.  Alexandria: ASCD.