wilhelm and others

after hearing jeff wilhelm speak at the inquiry night, i was curious about the statistics he quoted in his keynote address. i will check out his book "reading don't fix no chevy's" (where he published his research about engaging learners) from the bsu library, so if you need it, i'll have it!

also, i'm in the middle of moving. it's quite an ordeal =) however, i found ballenger and payne's "the curious reader" in my stack of teaching writing textbooks, and there are lots of great passages:

"The Curious Reader: Exploring Personal and Academic Inquiry is the book we've always wanted to have. We believe it has some new things to say about reading and writing; and it emphasizes the many ways that reading can inspire a writer's own questions about the world. This is a book that is as much about writing as it is about reading, maybe more. We never stop prompting, prodding, and provoking student writing in this text. We don't want them to put their pens down." (x)

"The interesting thing about this spirit of inquiry is that it's really an extension of the kind of thinking and writing you may have already done in your composition class or some other course that involved writing. In fact, these inquiring habits of mind have much in common with your way of seeing as a child." (5) [I like that Ballenger and Payne are appealing to an innate sense of curiousity and are drawing connections to other courses. It makes inquiry sound less formidable.]

"Rather than passively reporting on what you hae found in a text or in the library, consider the alternative of relfecting on what all that information means, where it came from, and how it was presented. We need, in other words, to dive into the dialectical thinking [of distinguishing between experience and reflection on that experience] we talked about earlier where we both listen to information and think critically about it and learn to tolerate the ambiguity that such reflection creates." (18)