K.P. Mohanan
Inquiry is the investigation of a question or a problem. The result of a successful process of inquiry is an answer/solution to the question/problem under investigation, often accompanied by a conclusion arising from that answer/solution. Academic inquiry is inquiry that academic communities engage in, to investigate academic questions/problems, documented in research papers, articles, and books, parts of which are transmitted to students through lectures and textbooks. This workshop is about instilling among the young some of the mindset and habits of thought that are characteristic of academic inquiry, namely, intellectual skepticism, willingness to challenge “authority”, open-mindedness, awareness of the fallibility and uncertainty of human beliefs, willingness to look for evidence, and readiness to correct oneself when evidence demands it.
Over the past few years, I have been preoccupied with constructing an integrated theory of academic inquiry that covers the entire spectrum of subjects taught in a university, with the hope that it can act both as a trans-disciplinary foundation for multidisciplinary research, and as an infrastructure for undergraduate students to move from non-specialist inquiry in one subject to another, as part of their general education. Examples of pedagogical exposition and tasks based on the theory are available in the NUS web module on Academic Inquiry (under construction):
http://wiki.nus.edu.sg/display/aki/Home
and in the units on academic inquiry in our web module on Academic Culture: http://emodule.nus.edu.sg/ac/
In this workshop, we will explore, in a hands-on fashion, how a model of academic inquiry illustrated in the mind-map below can form the basis for constructing learning tasks for critical thinking and inquiry in a wide spectrum of subjects.
