Everybody can do inquiry. Everybody does do inquiry. One time my 2-year-old daughter and I pulled up alongside a school bus and my daughter pointed to it and said “school bus.” I asked her “how do you know that’s a school bus?” She replied “it’s yellow.” She had used evidence—the yellowness of the bus—to communicate a conclusion—that the bus was of the school variety.
Yet C3 inquiries can sometimes seem complex and inaccessible. Why is this? I’m convinced that it is because lesson-writers who seek to use the C3 Framework are tempted to bite off more than they can chew. When I wrote my first C3 inquiries I struggled with paring down massive documents to a point where they met student reading levels, and when I was done I felt that the lesson didn’t necessarily offer the students a lot of learning for the amount of reading they did and the class time it took.
I want to use this newly-written lesson on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as an example of how to avoid these pitfalls. I’ve written three handy tips for making more-or-less bite-size inquiries that teachers and students should find accessible.
- Let your inquiries be humble. Students need a lot of scaffolding and practice to gain inquiry skills. It may not be best to start them with multi-day lesson-units that culminate in long essays. Just getting them used to drawing conclusions from small bits of evidence and defending their conclusions is enough to begin with. Yes, this might mean that some of your instruction uses secondary sources and other “shortcuts” to knowledge. But it’s best to use your inquiry ideas when they are their most powerful, rather than having them become ponderous. To find inquiry ideas at their most powerful, I suggest that you…
- Start at the source. That is, think about Dimension 3 (evaluating sources and using evidence) before Dimension 1 (developing questions and planning inquiries). Researchers of all levels are limited not by the quality of their ideas, but by the quality of their available sources. If you ask huge questions (e.g. “is international trade good for an economy?” or “what caused WWI?”) then you will be left to analyze either secondary sources, simplified explanations, or loads of complex data. When tasked with creating a lesson about TPP, we looked at which sources would be accessible and went from there. We used clips of campaign speeches and the executive summary of a preliminary analysis of TPP. From the primary sources we had available, we decided that it would be appropriate simply to ask if the candidates were telling us the whole story about TPP in their speeches. The sources were too limited to get to the very bottom of every burning question about international trade, but that was ok. Faced with a compelling question but limited evidence, we decided to…
- Let questions lead to more questions. Of course, the answer to “are the candidates telling us to whole story about TPP?” is “no.” With all due respect to the candidates, that is to be expected. After all, introductory economics textbooks don’t tell the whole story either! Where to go from there? Instead of slamming the door shut on inquiry, it’s best to stay humble (see point number 1!) and let the lesson be a jump-off point for future inquiry. In this lesson, students are asked to write questions that they would ask the candidates if they were debate moderators. Allowing the inquiry to end with more questions is a great way to approach Dimension 1, especially the difficult-to-access indicators D1.1. and D1.2 (enduring ideas and disagreements in a field). However, we did provide a long document that students can continue to study if they want more information, or if the teacher assigns an extension activity (e.g. “Study a specific business sector described in the document…”).
Readers with an eye that is critical toward trade will notice that we did not start with an agnostic stance on the issue. We present the candidates’ speeches in the context of a well-developed topic in the field of economics. This bears some explanation. That the benefits of trade outweigh the costs is still a truism, despite heavy scrutiny and some recent studies that have raised eyebrows. The most fruitful critique of the classic view of international trade is a recent paper by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, which finds that workers who have been displaced by competition with Chinese industry have found new jobs at a “stunningly” slow rate, which raises the “cost” side of the cost-benefit model regarding trade. (In our lesson plan, these trade-related costs can be seen in the negative numbers that affect some hypothetical companies.)
Yet even the Autor paper lays the problem not so much on trade generally—and it notes that “China Shock” has now run its course—but on the recent mystery of American labor market inflexibility. That is, that American workers affected by Chinese competition have adjusted to a dynamic economy at a much slower rate than they have in the past, and that gains from trade are only realized once this transition is complete. Other recent papers that seek new ways to quantify the impact of international trade actually go in the other direction: they debate whether we find the “same old gains,” or whether there are new gains to found from better measurement techniques. In making this TPP lesson, we decided that the classic way to express issues about international trade still holds true: that the benefits outweigh the costs, but that there are indeed costs that should be taken seriously and with compassion. However, students should be skeptical of political candidates who promise policies with only benefits and no costs.