Final Blog Post

It is hard to separate this inquiry class with the garden - if there's any class I feel most attached to the garden it is inquiry. Perhaps it was the three straight hours spent there on Thursdays but I know for certain it was the moments we spent by ourselves reflecting in the garden (for me, the grapes). As I look back on my blogposts for this class I'm realizing where the non-traditional teaching methods and weaving Indigenous pedagogies came from in my education this first semester. Having Susan for three courses this semester, sometimes the lines get blurred and you don't remember which things you learned in which class but now I know. Rope-braiding, Salish weaving and such were taught to us in this class and what a wonderful semester I had doing such activities and learning such things. 

It is ironic that in this class is where we learned these things and then it is also in this class that I had my project be on student engagement. I really do want to try using one of these activities or crocheting during arbitrary math lessons to see if it could help student engagement.

Inquiry is definitely a journey and one I look forward to continuing throughout the rest of this program. Honestly, the blogposts are much fewer than I remember but I think that's because the class was only once a week. Within a few scrolls I'm able to reach posts from September where we discussed nature in heavy detail. I think this sort captures the essence of inquiry for me, reflecting and thinking. Critical thinking. Comparative reasoning. What we did in the garden in terms of comparing nature with manmade gave us the opportunity to critically think about such things outside just the garden and buildings around us. It also gives us the opportunity to reflect on mathematics outside our classrooms and how we can bring different lines of thinking into them.