Semantics...
Yeah, I'm being a posty McPost pants. Deal.
I just had a nice conversation from LJ: Rosina about Inquiry Based Learning, aka IBL.
Anyway, that lead me to wondering about the difference (if any) between 'inquiry' and 'enquiry'.
This is what I found elseweb, on one of the dictonary sites:
"Enquiry and inquiry have long existed together as alternative spellings of the same word. In America inquiry is dislodging enquiry for all purposes. In England a useful distinction is developing: enquiry is used for asking a question and inquiry for making an investigation. Thus you might enquire what time the inquiry begins."
That sounds kind of neat, actually.
Before I looked it up, I'd wondered about 'invoke' vs 'evoke'; one is to ask the divine to come to you, the other is to pull something up out of oneself.
Anyway, these two seem to jibe: could enquiry mean pulling something, curiously, up out of yourself, and inquiry mean to investigate and explore something external to oneself?
Hmmmm....
I'm glad that the educational practice is called Inquiry-Based Learning. Curricula SHOULD make students curious, and create an environment in which those questions are welcome and valued, but using it, counting on it, as a full means of educating would seem the province of unschoolers/auto-didacts, not formalized teaching.
IBL without enquiry, by my definitions, is often seen as contrived, but, if one actually works from a student-driven paradigm, or has somehow generated genuine buy-in, they come together. *Then* you get magic....
I just had a nice conversation from LJ: Rosina about Inquiry Based Learning, aka IBL.
Anyway, that lead me to wondering about the difference (if any) between 'inquiry' and 'enquiry'.
This is what I found elseweb, on one of the dictonary sites:
"Enquiry and inquiry have long existed together as alternative spellings of the same word. In America inquiry is dislodging enquiry for all purposes. In England a useful distinction is developing: enquiry is used for asking a question and inquiry for making an investigation. Thus you might enquire what time the inquiry begins."
That sounds kind of neat, actually.
Before I looked it up, I'd wondered about 'invoke' vs 'evoke'; one is to ask the divine to come to you, the other is to pull something up out of oneself.
Anyway, these two seem to jibe: could enquiry mean pulling something, curiously, up out of yourself, and inquiry mean to investigate and explore something external to oneself?
Hmmmm....
I'm glad that the educational practice is called Inquiry-Based Learning. Curricula SHOULD make students curious, and create an environment in which those questions are welcome and valued, but using it, counting on it, as a full means of educating would seem the province of unschoolers/auto-didacts, not formalized teaching.
IBL without enquiry, by my definitions, is often seen as contrived, but, if one actually works from a student-driven paradigm, or has somehow generated genuine buy-in, they come together. *Then* you get magic....