Many longstanding youth media organizations, including the Educational Video Center (www.evc.org), Appalshop (http://appalshop.org/ami/, and Downtown Community TV (www.dctvny.org) recognize video production as an effective tool for student engagement in community inquiry projects. The value of inquiry-based learning was established by John Dewey over a century ago, as noted below:

In his voluminous writings, John Dewey developed and applied his theory of inquiry in a wide range of arenas, including aesthetics, public policy, psychology, and education. There is a social context to inquiry learning in that students need opportunities to share new ideas. In his discussion of the relation between the learner and the curriculum, describes a learner's four primary interests:

• Inquiry, or investigation: the natural desire to learn.
• Communication: the propensity to enter into social relationships.
• Construction: the delight in creating things.
• Expression, or reflection: the desire to extract meaning from experience.

Thus, inquiry-based learning is often described as a cycle or spiral, involving the formulation of a question, investigation, creation of an appropriate solution or answer, discussion, and reflection on the outcome.

A community of inquiry helps each of its members think critically, creatively, compassionately, and effectively, which often leads to both individual and collective action, discussion, and further analysis of puzzling questions and phenomena. Communities of inquiry are characterized by mutual cooperation, open-ended questions, building upon a range of viewpoints in an environment where all ideas are respected, and taking responsibility to think for oneself.

From Supporting Community Inquiry with Digital Resources. Ann Peterson Bishop et. al., Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The videos on this blog were produced by teachers conducting an inquiry-based project about Main Street in Columbia. Please view the videos and write a response to two of them in the context of Dewey's ideas about community inquiry as noted in the excerpt above. Consider how Dewey's ideas are reflected in the videos. What do they tell you about the group's process and objectives? How did the teachers use inquiry to learn about an aspect of downtown? What meaning did they discover through interviews? 

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