FORM4050 · Education

The Art of Educational Inquiry

Lynch School of Education & Human Development

While education and educational research are often seen as separate activities, transformative education holds that the quest to form ourselves entails asking questions about the nature and direction of our growth. Inquiry is simultaneously an effort to understand, a social intervention, and an art of self-fashioning. This seminar invites students into the art of educational inquiry. Through examination of paradigmatic texts and visits from Lynch faculty members describing their own work, we consider the affordances of major traditions of educational inquiry. Working toward a formal proposal for a scholarly investigation, artistic creation, or public action, students are supported to articulate, deepen, and refine their own driving questions about educational concepts, relationships, practices, institutions, and aims. (Students who take EDUC 4050 in their junior year may wish to develop the work itself as a senior project.)