CCI

=Collaborative Critical Inquiry=

If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. -- Plato quotes Socrates in the Phaedrus  Socrates was no fan of writing. This upstart tool/technology threatened his way of teaching through face-to-face dialogue.

Freinet and Daniel, French educators who had their classes collaborate in the 1920s, not only believed in the power of writing to teach but bought printing presses so their students could share their writing through the mail. Thus, what might have been the first distance learning began.

*Freinet and Daniel not only had their students writing and sharing their writing but organized the writing around various questions or issues. They called these projects “Collaborative Critical Inquiries” and this became a model for interschool projects dedicated to encouraging critical thinking.

In this session we will employ the Collaborative Critical Inquiry approach in this, a contemporary distance learning course, to use not only writing but virtual face-to-face dialogue to explore a question critical to our study of learning through literature with young adults – how can we build on relevant theories of literature, literacy, and learning to construct a framework that links theory and practice? Socrates would be happy that we have not forgotten the oral and Freinet would be impressed that technology has brought us this far.

The theories that we will study include well-known ones from literature, literacy, and learning as well as some contemporary ones that are worth considering. I will provide some resources below but please add additional ones that you think will be helpful.

Here's a video in which I present the stages of our Collaborative Critical Inquiries. ..

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In the spirit of the CCI, participants will collaborate on an inquiry by sharing what they know and learning from each other to address an important question. We’ll use VoiceThread, an audio message tool, to help us accomplish this.

You can read the chapter in [|Brave New School by Cummins and Sayers (2000) titled “Blueprints from the Past”] to learn more about these early distance learning pioneers.