Curriculum, learning and teaching
Inquiring together: student and teacher collaboration Victoria Wasner talks us through an innovative ‘Change-Makers’ CAS project
• How does meaningful teacher and student involvement as collaborative inquirers into service learning model a pedagogy for service learning?
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In the spirit of IB CAS, service learning (Berger Kaye, 2010) and the mission and values of the IB, our project was planned to be collaborative (IB, 2015), democratic (IB, 2017) and to involve different inquiry cycles of action and reflection (IB, 2013). It was an attempt to model an educational practice that reflected my beliefs that pedagogy should be critical, responsible, risky, democratic and, ultimately, ethical. Researching as a teacher in practice, I also knew that I would need to respond to the context and practicalities of school life, adapting my methods as the project progressed and being flexible about where the project led. Team Change Makers After an open call to the whole cohort, 7 grade 11 girls came forward to participate in the project (see photo). It would have been easier in practical terms if I had simply worked together with my CAS group as timetable would have dictated; however, it was an important part of the inquiry that students had the option to take part, and in the name of choice and voice, we lived with the consequences of that decision. We named ourselves ‘Team Change Makers’, as the aim was to consider how we could work together to bring about change within our school. The year-long inquiry involved a process of eight different research cycles that were driven by my own practitioner questions and by questions that we developed together as the year progressed. As a group we met several times across the year, sometimes having in-depth discussions about the topic of service learning (cycle 2), learning about what it meant to carry out ethical research (cycle 4), how to collaborate with other teachers and get our voices heard (cycle 5) and how to share our knowledge and understanding with others in our school community (cycle 7). Individual interviews also captured student thoughts, and we used a virtual learning environment to reflect, make suggestions, give feedback and construct research questions. The girls also divided into two groups to conduct their own research with peers in other grades, after having designed their own research questions using an ‘ice-cream model’ technique (Brownhill et al, 2017). Figure 1 shows the girls using this model to define their questions. Throughout the year, the students found themselves involved in different collaborative spaces beyond our Team Change Makers (TCM) group; they worked with teachers in a Professional Learning Community (PLC) entitled ‘Beyond Summer |
Winter
What makes a good International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Creativity Activity Service (CAS) project? How can we learn to understand what ethical practice looks like, and how to carry out research in a more ethical way? How can we teachers act as role models in our embodiment of the attributes of learner dispositions and behaviours? How can we bring about change in our school environments? How can we facilitate student voice? What does ethical service learning look like and how are we going about it in practice? These were some of the questions that drove me to undertake a year-long collaborative inquiry project with a group of students at the high school where I teach, and where I have been IB CAS and Middle Years Programme (MYP) service learning coordinator for the past few years. The initial research question was:
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