Reigniting Curiosity and Inquiry in Higher Education: A Realist’s Guide to Getting Started With Inquiry-Based Learning

How do you develop students’ capacities as independent learners, build their confidence and motivation to identify their own research agendas, and facilitate their critical thinking and research skills for effectively exploring their chosen topic? Inquiry-based learning (IBL) offers a proven means to achieve these outcomes.

IBL is a scaffolded learner-centered, student-led approach to inquiry whereby students progressively design and lead their own inquiry process, with support from the instructor. It’s a powerful pedagogical approach that you can progressively adopt, first adopting it as an activity in a course to develop you and your students’ comfort with the practice, right up to developing an entire course or program utilizing IBL. It offers varying levels of engagement as you and your students gain familiarity with the practice, from the instructor providing structured support, to formative guidance as students gain confidence, to a point where students become increasingly self-directed and independent and are supported by the review of student peers and validated by presentations of their work to the class. This pedagogy shifts the student/instructor relationship, with the former leading and the latter supporting.

IBL is a flexible teaching and learning approach that be can progressively adopted and developed without a specific formula, and that positions students as co-constructors of knowledge, rather than passive recipients. It is student-driven, creates engagement, develops a curiosity mindset, promotes group learning that is collaborative rather than competitive, fosters metacognition, and builds confidence as students learn to deal with ambiguity and risk.

Each chapter offers personal stories, vignettes, examples of practice, and discussions of issues.

This book offers higher education instructors at any career stage and in any discipline, a realistic guide to incorporating curiosity and inquiry-based learning into their classrooms to promote long term knowledge creation and retention and life-wide learning.

IBL is being increasingly adopted across the English-speaking world. Beyond its inherent capacity to promote independent learning, it offers a perfect foundation for preparing students for Signature Work and capstone courses; and is adaptable to small and large classes.

Stacey L. MacKinnon is an associate professor with the Department of Psychology at the University of Prince Edward Island. Stacey has spent the last 12 years designing and implementing The Curiosity Project and the past six years developing and coordinating UPEI 1020 First Year Inquiry Studies. She is the recipient of the 2012 Hessian Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2012 President’s Award of Merit for Teaching, 2016 UPEI Professor of the Year, and the 2022 Janet Pottie Murray Award for Excellence in Education Leadership. As a lifelong and life-wide learner herself, Stacey strives to inspire her students and colleagues to fully engage their curiosity mindset and inquiry skills to explore all the possibilities our world has to offer. She is currently developing a new approach to reading non-fiction that incorporates active inquiry to improve students’ ability and willingness to engage in deeper critical understanding, academic discussion and the quality of both their informal and formal writing. She strongly believes that learning should be both enjoyable and challenging for both the students and professor. By harnessing our curiosity or “desire to inquire”, much can be done to achieve that goal.

Beth Archer-Kuhn is an associate professor with the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Calgary. As a Teaching and Learning Scholar (Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning) and recipient of the Teaching Excellence Award (Faculty of Social Work), Beth has spent the last ten years learning about IBL-HE through implementation and SoTL research with undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students within courses on-campus, study abroad, and on-line. She believes IBL-HE is a socially just and inclusive pedagogy that aligns with the values of social work education, can support students with varied learning preferences, and allows students the necessary choice and agency to inspire lifelong learners.