Inquiry into music: course home

Introduction

This module serves as the orientation and course "home" for an experimental course that takes an inquiry-based approach to learning about music. The purpose of the course is to provide guidance for individuals or groups in designing and carrying out music-learning inquiries that are tailored to the educational goals, learning style, cultural background, musical knowledge, and interests of the individual learners.

You will find in this module

• A short general introduction to inquiry-based learning,
• A description of the specific music-learning inquiry process used in this course,
• Advice for teachers and others who are interested in facilitating a group inquiry,
• A list of inquiry modules offered through this course.
• Suggested resources for further reading about inquiry-based learning.

What is inquiry-based learning?

Inquiry-based learning is an active, learner-centered , structured but open-ended approach to education.

Traditional teacher-centered schooling methods rely on lectures, textbooks, and rote practice to give students a standardized set of knowledge and skills. Although such methods are efficient and convenient for educators and curriculum designers, many influential educators, psychologists, and philosophers have noted that this approach does not fit well with the way that people learn naturally. Humans have a strong innate interest in learning how their world works, what is going on around them, and how to do things. Think of a toddler who asks questions about everything around him, a child who wants to join in an activity she has been watching, or an adult who takes up a new hobby. All of them are experiencing learning as enjoyable and interesting. Unfortunately, standardized lecture-and-textbook approaches are typically too general and abstract to engage this natural inclination to enjoy learning, because they are not well-connected to the students' immediate, specific curiosities about the world around them. If students do not make those connections for themselves, the information and skills seem to be useless and irrelevant in "real life" and are soon forgotten. In this view, education that is more explicitly connected to the students' lives, and to their natural impulses to understand their world and be capable of acting in it, should be more effective as well as more enjoyable.

Based on these ideas, a variety of learner-centered teaching methods have been developed that take into account what the students in a course already know and understand, what engages their interest, and what they might want to be able to do with the thing-to-be-learned. Since learner-centered methods are often active learning methods that feature learning-through-doing, they are sometimes categorized according to what the students do: for example, a course might be described as inquiry-based learning, problem-based learning, project-based learning, case-based learning, or role-playing.