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| Photo by Ana Municio on Unsplash |
The student questions that are beautiful are the ones that extend knowledge, deepen understanding, and build new insights. Unfortunately, students sometimes think asking a question is a show of weakness. A sign of this thinking is when I ask students to write questions they have in the margin of a text, and they come to the discussion proclaiming with satisfaction that they didn’t have any. They understood it all. Or their only questions are about the meaning of unknown words.
Identifying what is unknown is an essential first step, a place to start, and it is only the launch pad, not the stars. The rocket boosters ignited in one of my classes last week—a middle school advanced English as a foreign language (EFL) class. We were reading When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park, a novel set in Korea during the Japanese occupation. We had just read about a character seeing airplanes flying overhead to Manchuria. From there, here’s my attempt at following the trajectory of the students’ questions:
(1) What is Manchuria? We confirmed the Japanese name.
(2) How did Tae-yul know the airplanes were going to Manchuria? We looked at the world map on the classroom wall and saw that China was the only option for Japanese planes flying over Korea.
(3) Why did the Japanese want to control Manchuria? We talked about natural resources, the colonial precedent of the western powers, and the slogan “Asia for the Asians.”
(4) How many countries did England control? I started listing some: America, Kenya, India, China, Australia….
(5) What language was spoken in Australia before English? We discussed indigenous people all over the world and the myth of empty land.
(6) How did the tiny island England come to control so much area? Wow. This could be an entire course, an entire book, an entire library full of books, but I channelled what I could remember from Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel.
(7) But not all Japanese people did terrible things in the war, right? We talked about two types of responsibility—personal and corporate. As a Christian, I understand that individuals are fallen, and also that all the social constructs they make are fallen. People do bad things; the groups they are part of do bad things. No nation has the corner on this: last term we read about the US internment of Japanese-Americans.
We also know that when we confess sin, personal and corporate, God forgives us and loves us. We have no face to save by defending ourselves, only grace and freedom to gain by confession. Then we can look into the faces of people who have suffered and say, “Please tell me your story. That’s terrible. What can be done to repair the harm?” People in the Bible like Daniel and Nehemiah set an example of repenting before God for the corporate sins of their ancestors in order to bring restoration in the present.
(8) Didn’t God tell people in the Bible to kill other people? Yes. Yes, he did. Those are hard passages to think about. I think it has to do with God’s holiness, justice, and power. Let’s keep talking about it. And while those stories are old and difficult, we can know what God wants us to do today: love him, love our neighbors, love our enemies, do justice, care for the creation, and invite others to know him.
Whew! That was one crammed period—and we only actually read two paragraphs of the novel. But that’s okay because the important thing is not that we finished the chapter. The important thing is that students’ curiosity was ignited, and they began to want to know for themselves why the world works the way it does, what their place in it is, and how faith informs it.
I see a research project in this class’s near future, one driven by finding answers to the questions they still have, because I'm sure I didn't sufficiently answer them all.
And I’m wondering what exactly happened on Wednesday to unleash that train of questions. All I can say is, I will keep trying to cultivate a classroom environment where it is safe to ask questions. I will keep inviting, expecting, requiring questions. I will keep telling students why asking questions is important. When questions come, I will keep celebrating, respecting, and giving time to them. And sometimes, like this week, the rocket ship will take off for the stars.
Whew! That was one crammed period—and we only actually read two paragraphs of the novel. But that’s okay because the important thing is not that we finished the chapter. The important thing is that students’ curiosity was ignited, and they began to want to know for themselves why the world works the way it does, what their place in it is, and how faith informs it.
I see a research project in this class’s near future, one driven by finding answers to the questions they still have, because I'm sure I didn't sufficiently answer them all.
And I’m wondering what exactly happened on Wednesday to unleash that train of questions. All I can say is, I will keep trying to cultivate a classroom environment where it is safe to ask questions. I will keep inviting, expecting, requiring questions. I will keep telling students why asking questions is important. When questions come, I will keep celebrating, respecting, and giving time to them. And sometimes, like this week, the rocket ship will take off for the stars.
How about you? What do you do to cultivate students' asking questions? When have you seen those questions drive deep thinking?
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