Pelletier – the educator’s approach to inquiry

I think there is a stance toward teaching early childhood education that comes more naturally for some than for others, but there is a piece of trust and a piece of letting go a little bit that might be hard for some people to do. But when you do learn to trust that children have amazing questions, and you learn that you don’t have to know all the answers you yourself, but you become one of the learners with the children in the class, and of course you know how to bring things forward in a way maybe that children don’t. I can give an example of a little four year old girl I was interacting with, and she was collecting a couple of things that were red, and she wanted to take photographs of them, and I asked her well why don’t we just make a collection of red? So that lead to a collection of colours, and that lead to a series of documentation panels with these different collections, and the vocabulary that came out of those things, just naming the objects, and the concepts, and seriation, and classification, so many things came out of her idea to photograph something, and I think it was just that I, maybe I’d been reading about it and I felt that I could go with it, and I can see such value in following children’s lead.  

I think if you think about inquiry in diverse context, what you realize is that you don’t need stuff. You need a stance toward the inquiry process. So, it would be educators taking children outside. Children find discoveries in a mud puddle. They find discoveries in anything they observe; each other, or babies. Children want to know why babies cry or why they make the faces that they do. These are all sources of inquiry that don’t require expensive toys or tools but rather they require children’s natural curiosity and questions. And so being able to build on that no matter where you are is really the skill of a good inquiry educator.  

I think if we could be a little more childlike in the way that we approach teaching children, where we allow ourselves to observe what they observe, and it’s really just taking that one step further. I mean we as adults have the ability to introduce something new. To ask a question that a child might not ask, but it’s amazing what they can ask each other too. I think a great skill is having children build on each other’s theories. You think this about why leaves change colour, and he thinks that about why leaves change colour and she thinks this, so what can we do to figure out why leaves change colour? And so then just taking that one step further. Or you notice this in a mud puddle, he notices that in a mud puddle. How can we take this one step further and trusting that the children will have some great ideas? So it is a little bit of faith, but you also have to trust in yourself as a very good educator who understands children.