Curriculum and Teaching as Collaborative Inquiry: Co-Learning, Co-Teaching, and Co-Researching with Students

By: Rob Simon

What are alternatives to positioning teachers as experts and students as passive learners?

What happens when teachers position themselves next to students, as co-learners?

What changes when we invite students to teach teachers?

We have all been socialized into systems and practices of teaching and learning that are hierarchical, that can position students as passive learners and teachers as “experts.” In Addressing Injustices, we use practices like Big Paper and arts-based projects to invite more collaborative, less hierarchical, relationships among teachers and students.

In this, we are guided by Freirean pedagogy, as well as insights from scholars like Elizabeth Ellsworth (1997), who remind us of the need to “shake up solidified and limiting ways of thinking about and practicing teaching” with the goal of making “visible and problematic the ways that all curricula and pedagogies invite their users to take up particular positions within relationships of knowledge, power, and desire” (p. 2).

Shifting traditional teaching and learning roles can be destabilizing. It often means that students take the lead—I sometimes tell youth in our project that they are the youngest teacher educators in Canada—and this can be destabilizing for teachers. It involves letting go of our penchant as educators to control or manage pedagogical relationships. It also means acknowledging, even embracing, the uncertainty that collaborative inquiry invites.

Shifting traditional teaching and learning roles can be destabilizing.

Our work together involves several layers of inquiry. We are simultaneously teaching Sarah’s grade 8 class, supporting teacher candidates in their curriculum and instruction course, co-creating arts-based responses to the social justice issues and texts we explore together, and co-researching all of that. In the process, we blur lines between research and teaching, between the desires and perspectives of young people and adults, between education and activism, between middle school and teacher education, and between learning and teaching more generally.

Participating in participatory research—co-teaching, co-researching, and co-learning—means that each of us has different investments in and feelings about our collective project. By taking an inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) on who learns and who teaches, we try to get closer to a shared vision of teaching, learning, and researching, one that is never settled, but allows for a multiplicity of perspectives, participation, and possibilities.