Information Literacy 'Research as Inquiry

The frame ‘Research as inquiry’ focuses or mainly surrounds the notion that there must always be questions asked. Questions form the main part of research, there can never be research, or new work done if there isn’t a question or questions. And constantly asking questions relates to inquiry based learning.

In this class I learned that research is iterative (a process of back and forth). This means basically that research or asking questions leading to research is basically a process of going back and forth. Eg. A friend says to you ‘tap water that we drink in South Africa is unsafe or unhygienic to drink’. Being an academic, or having an inquisitive mind you don’t just take things at face value and decide to do a bit of research on this topic. Let’s say for interest sake (This is just an example I haven’t done research to either support or disprove this phenomenon) that this is false but research uncovers that this is taking place in other places and one decides to investigate this and ask why isn’t anything being done by the governing body of that state. And this leads to political reasons as to why and why not and this takes us to economics and so on.

Experts recognise the collaborative effort within a discipline to extend the knowledge in that field. Many times this process includes points of disagreement where debate and dialogue work to deepen the conversations around knowledge. And as such one discipline learns or implements concepts or ideas from another discipline to broaden the depth of that discipline.

It extends beyond the academic world; it’s not just people holding high end degrees but also the lay person. People who have personal needs, or individuals trying to solve a community problem.  An example of a societal need that was seen is The Rylands-Gatesville Civic Association that was successfully launched this year, it was started to try and help with the fight against gangsterism, robberies, drugs and so forth. A societal need observed over a long period and someone (Sataar Parker) took the initiative to do something about it.

The frame deals also with the way a research questions are structured or formed in order to get answers. And it deals with identifying and finding the gaps in knowledge.

This frame explains or basically tells us that gaining new knowledge leads to asking new questions. And so it ends with the example that I gave earlier where the one friend tells the other friend about the impurities of tap water in South Africa and that leading to research and then new questions are formed and asked and researched and so the process is repeated and repeated.

 http://www.inspiredteaching.org/wp-content/uploads/impact-research-briefs-inquiry-based-teaching.pdf