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Creating: Making Presentations
Description
The inquiry process culminates with presentations in which students
show what they have learned. During a presentation, students should convey
the meaning they have constructed from their information and demonstrate
how the inquiry process led them there. These presentations can take many
forms: They may be multimedia events or simple written essays; they may
be done as a group or individually; they may be presented to the class or
to a larger community. The nature of the presentation will depend on the
scope of the inquiry, and on the imagination of the students and the teacher.
In Bo Wu's class on Esmeralda Santiago, students work toward a particular
kind of presentation, knowing they will ultimately write a memoir inspired
by Santiago's memoir. Wu asks them to pursue their questions about
Santiago's writing and find connections with their own lives. She
has them draw up timelines of similar themes in their own lives, and then
has them connect these personal events with events in history. As she walks
around the classroom, we see, for example, a young girl with a graphic organizer
which poses this question: "Is change good or bad?" This is
the question she is investigating both in Santiago's memoir and in
her own life. Later, she will write a memoir using that question as a theme.
In the "social worlds" model that educators Richard Beach and
Jamie Myers write about in Inquiry-Based English Instruction, each
student must study and ultimately present his or her research about a certain
social world. They may use tools ranging from oral and written narratives
to music/audio, cameras, computers, art and sculpture, and video. Students
should be able to say how their choice of media fits in with their particular
social world. A number of students in a ninth-grade class reading coming-of-age
stories, for example, created collages that showed links between the lives
of the characters and their own lives.
Benefits
The presentation phase draws all the previous work together into a coherent
whole. This is the students' chance to be creative and to use their own
talents to take raw information to another level. By having to think about
an audience to whom they will present the information, students begin to
impose structure on the mass of information, interpretation, and thought
that has led to this stage.
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Reflecting and Transforming: