Feldt & Petersen (2020) Inquiry-based learning in the humanities: moving from topics to problems using the Humanities Imagination

DOI: 10.1177/1474022220910368

This article is an attempt to outline how the pedagogical approach called Inquiry-based learning (IBL) can be put to use in the context of teaching in the field of Humanities. There are few references to literature discussing what IBL is, and there is not a lot in terms of a definition – other than stating that there are “significant overlaps with problem-based approaches” (p. 2), which isn’t defined either. However, it transpires that the method is also inspired by the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey, where explorations of a topic starts with questions rather than theories, and where concepts are the outcome rather than the starting point of an investigation.

Furthermore, the IBL-approach is inspired by Mills’ notion of “sociological imagination”. Applying this in a humanist context, rather than a social science one, it is understood as a way of bringing together problems and tendencies on the macro (societal, communal) with the micro (individual, personal) scale, in an attempt to “think about the dialectical and reciprocal relations between wider tendencies, larger histories and structures, and the particular situations of particular people.” (p.4).

With this as the background, the authors want IBL-inspired teaching to challenge students to approach a field as researchers rather than as students. This involves going from reading all the theories, mastering all the main concepts and methods before “getting their hands dirty” to approach a new field through posing questions that are experienced as meaningful, i.e. anchored in the students’ interests and “everyday experiences” (p. 2). Acknowledging that this is a tall task for unschooled students, new to a field, the article goes on by outlining a heuristic for how students can learn to pose critical and relevant questions.

According the authors, adopting IBL in this manner will bring about new practices for teaching, new roles for the teachers (as interlocutors rather than “experts”), and “a new balancing of the ecology of the Humanities emphasizing its particular imaginary over its disciplines” (p1.), which this reviewer – coming from a different field – frankly do not understand what means. In fact, a lot in this article is hard to make out, as I experience it to be written for an audience already well-informed about trends and developments in pedagogy. From an outside perspective, several paragraphs come across as being very vague and, if I may be a bit crass, saying next to nothing, using a complicated language.

That said, I am sympathetic to the ambitions of this article, and I do think the IBL-approach can be valuable, at least as a supplement for other approaches to teaching. The reason why I am reluctant for it to be adopted across the board, is my own experience of students as often expecting and wanting the teacher to be the expert, and learning as consisting in being taught the basic perspectives and theories in a field and being trained in a firm method. However, as I read IBL, this is also, more or less, the goal of IBL; it is only approached in a different, more indirect and student-active manner. But will students be prepared to approach learning in this manner – will they have the confidence to throw themselves into the deep end, early on in a class? In fact, I find the article to be a bit romantic (and maybe a bit naïve) in how it almost fetishizes students’ curiosity and devotion to the subject they are studying. This challenge is not, though, entirely lost on the authors and some space is devoted to talk about the changed responsibility of the teacher in creating an atmosphere where such a curiosity and openness can be stimulated. However, in my opinion, the article fails in being specific on how this may be achieved. Therefore, I find the article rather unconvincing in arguing for how IBL is to be implemented, although I am convinced that the IBL approach is excellent for students that do feel safe enough to go through with a more exploratory approach to their own learning.

The main reason I find the article to be unconvincing in outlining the new role for teachers (except for saying that a new role is needed) is in regard to the heuristic outlined. The article goes through two strategies, two “search heuristics” (p. 12) that teachers may use in order to get students going as “inquirers”: “making an analogy” (seeing how a problem was approached in a different context regarding a different issue) and “borrowing a method” (literally, using an established heuristic to approach a topic). Both methods strike me as quite common also in ordinary teaching. Given the emphasis on active learning here, I suspect that rather than using these search heuristics as examples in teaching, students themselves should study and apply them. But then, we’re right back at the challenge mentioned earlier, do students have the appropriate level of confidence in doing that?

Furthermore, I am not sure that this is a new role for teachers in the humanities. A lot of teaching in the humanities consists of reading texts. Whether written by historians, linguistics or philosophers, these texts are research materials. Bar very introductory classes, students most often approach their field of study by studying the research of others. In that sense, they are both making an analogy and borrowing a method through their traditional way of studying. If that is correct, students are already approaching their field of study by absorbing how one is posing research questions and how one goes about answering them in that field. Tacit learning, as it may be called.

That said, I see no wrong in emphasizing this, making it explicit, but I wonder if IBL is as new an approach as the authors claim. In my opinion, the article is written from a distinction that I find to be highly exaggerated (in fact, close to a strawman-distinction, if such a phrase could be used). Already on page 2, it is claimed that “Some educators observe that students have difficulty moving from a teacher-directed form of study to the type of work required in minor or major projects, where students more or less explicitly are repositioned from consumers to producers of knowledge”. I wonder if this distinction, although with a certain truth to it, is less pronounced in the humanities than in some other fields of study. Also and relatedly, throughout the article, the authors seem to make a big distinction between the content of study and the form of research. In my opinion, as mentioned, I believe that a lot of studying in the humanities is a form of research.

On a more of a side note, I am a bit puzzled about “hermeneutics” not being mentioned even once throughout the article. Especially since Gadamer, perhaps the foremost hermeneutics of the last 100 years, is mentioned, and given that the so-called “humanities imagination”, in my opinion is very similar to the hermeneutic method of Gadamer and others, where historical phenomena and tendencies are studied as being not just historical, but as having a certain actuality today. This is quite close to regarding history not as “as a particular subject matter (the past) or a particular disciplinary or institutional structure (historical research, historians, or departments of history) but trajectories of present realities and processes of the becoming of entities which stabilize structures, timelines, and patterns of causalities” (p.5).

To conclude, then, although I am sympathetic to IBL, believing it to emphasize a manner of approaching teaching that I find valuable, I am not convinced by the authors’ claim that this is something entirely new to the humanities. However, I do think that there is a lack of self-awareness about this in a lot of humanities teaching. For my own part, this article has certainly helped me in re-evaluating and articulating aspects of my own teaching as something approaching IBL, although it is not fully-fledged IBL. Generalizing this, I believe that it would have been a more fruitful approach by the authors to acknowledge that some humanities teaching already contain germs of IBL, and then “taken it from there”, discussing how pre-existing elements of IBL should be refined and made more explicit as a way of making the teaching better. This would have been a beneficial strategy for the article, in my opinion, instead of starting from this exaggerated distinction between students as consumers and producers. Reading original texts, as a lot of humanities education is all about, is a way of learning inquiry by doing.