Weaving and a Whole Lot of Reflection

Sorry, I started this post several days ago, but it has grown rather large and unwieldy during its gestational period. Every time I go in the tidy it up, I add more, so I decided to just post it.

As I worked to synthesize my findings, I found that my focus had shifted somewhat and I looked back to see what it had been in the beginning. It was the process of comparing the Swiss yodelers to the Western ones that made me realize that, though I could do that until the cows (or the goats) come home, it didn’t necessarily address the bigger question that I developed along the way. I think that the question I had after I had started- did real working cowboys and cowgirls yodel- was pivotal. Before that I had just assumed that since American cowherds did the same sort of work as Swiss herders, that they did use yodeling in their work. If I hadn't been looking for information about whether cowboy yodeling was real or just for the entertainment of all of us non-cowherds, I might have missed that there is plenty of reason to doubt that working cowboys really did yodel. So, what the shift meant for me was that I was no longer looking so much at the European styles of yodeling, but more at the culture of the U.S. Like a good inquiry project, it brought me new questions. I will want to do more research about the relationship between singing cowboys and the cultural climate at the time of their greatest popularity. For instance, ever since I was a kid, I have loved hobo stories and songs. I was surprised to find hobo songs on a Gene Autry CD and hadn't really connected Jimmie Rodgers with Western music. These matters are connected, though, and so hoboing and hobo songs are more related to cowherding and cowgirl songs than I had previously thought. (It's not just that both hobos and cowboys eat their beans from a can, which is of course related to their itinerant lifestyles.) I suspect that, as it always seems to turn out, it's really related to economics.
I think somewhere in our readings it is mentioned that as critical thinkers and researchers, we need to be seeking information to support our learning, not just to support our assumptions.

It's probably a learned agility and, as such, it's our job to teach it to students. It feels, now, like that is really doable. As a young person, especially being taught to do the standard “research paper” assignment in high school, this shift would have really derailed me. First, it meant the loss of the time I had spent looking for answers that were no longer important. In the traditional student research paper, there is no value at all placed on the work that students do that is not somehow used in the final paper. This is what’s great about this kind of project, isn’t it? We don’t really want our students to possess an extraordinary amount of information about the benefits of welfare reform or abortion rights or anything of those topics, but we want them to know how to learn and how to access, manage and process information. So, assessing their process as much or more than their product gives the process value in the kind of currency that matters in school. It occurs to me, too, that the “need gateway” that Sandy Guild wrote about in Chapter 7 of Curriculum Connections, is one that we need to help students see their way through over and over again, if we want them to really learn the kind of agility they’ll need as adult learners. Guild talks about effort, importance and affect as that gateway through which we pass as we begin an inquiry. If we, as teachers, address the affective aspects of the process via encouragement and maybe Kuhlthau’s intervention at the tricky spots, value student’s expenditures of effort by assessing their process, and allow them the freedom to pursue a course of inquiry that is important to them, not just us, we really can see them through that gateway as many times as they need to go in order to engage in real inquiry.