Innovating Through Student-led Inquiry Projects

Thanks to generous funding from the Vancouver Foundation, student-led inquiry projects are in full swing across the province. Students, with direct support from educators, are taking ownership over their learning in new and exciting ways. They are generating their own ideas about what they want to learn and how they will learn it, and often times, inquiry has become a powerful way for students to connect to history and build identity. 

For instance, Ecole Davis Rd. Elementary in Ladysmith (SD #68) is focusing their inquiry around introducing the use of an Aboriginal Value System to increase respectful communication and actions within their community of learners.  Pacific Coast School, a non-traditional school in Prince Rupert (SD #52) is focusing on the concept of stewardship.  Students will develop individual inquiries around what it means to be a steward of the environment, depending on the expertise of the Aboriginal Education Department and sharing the learning with the community Aboriginal Council.   Both school inquiry teams have been influenced by the First People’s Principles of Learning, developed by British Columbia’s First Nations Education Steering Committee, to shift their thinking around using wise ways to develop Aboriginal understandings.

School teams are also learning strategies that support developing a good inquiry question, and how to remain focused on that question throughout the learning process. City Central Learning Centre in Surrey (SD #36) is demonstrating this by providing students with self-regulated learning strategies to promote successful student inquiry in an alternative school setting.

We’re excited by the projects underway and how students, teachers and communities are coming together through inquiry and learning.  For a full list of school questions this year, click here.