Inquiry-Based English Instruction : Engaging Students in Life and Literature

I recommend this book to teachers hoping to energize their literature or writing classes by positioning all students as creative, ambitious researchers capable of critiquing or even transforming worlds outside the classroom. When I discovered it two months ago, it struck me as just the resource I needed for revitalizing my college survey of multicultural literature for freshman and sophomores, a course which sometimes engaged and sometimes bored students. I have since redesigned materials for the course, using Beach and Myers' idea that to fully understand literature-or our own lives-we must think of individual people (whether characters in a story, authors of those stories, or ourselves and others in the real world) as part of larger systems or "social worlds," acting to protect and continue those systems or to challenge and change them. The book clearly delineates the components of social worlds and is full of sample activities and assignments; with these, I have revised my own discussion questions,presentation assignments and writing prompts. I have also shown Chapter 8, "School and Sports Worlds," to several high school teachers who now plan to assign the ethnographic inquiry projects outlined there rather than assigning traditional research papers. This is a practical, accessible, entirely useable book.