What Are My Questions?

Last week in our EDCI 336 class, we had Trevor MacKenzie speak as a guest lecturer. He uses the practice of inquiry education in his classroom and had a lot of interesting ideas and suggestions of how we as pre-service teachers can think about inquiry education in our own future practice. Part of what I learned through additional research on Trevor MacKenzie was how to get students to be asking their own questions, and how to recognize what good questions are. I realized that within the free inquiry project I have been embarking on as a part of the EDCI 336 class, I have yet to spend time laying out what my exact inquiry questions are. This weekend I decided to spend time thinking about what questions I was hoping to work on going forward in this project. Here are some of them that I have come up with:

1. How can I better use my creative outlets as a source of stress relief?
2. Should I be dedicating specific times during the week for my creative endeavors, or should I do these activities as I feel like I want/need to do them?
3. If I am feeling uninspired, what are some things I can do to create inspiration?
4. How can I learn to overcome feelings of inadequacy when it comes to sharing the products of my creative outlets?

I have come up with partial answers to some of these questions. For example, question 2 asks about the “when” in my free inquiry. I think to a certain extent that I should have some scheduled time for creation. At the same time though, I don’t want to start feeling frustrated or stuck when doing something that is supposed to be stress-relieving. Going forward I will try to schedule in some creative time but in a more general sense rather than a specific block of time. For example, saying “I am going to paint sometime on Friday” rather than “I will get some painting done in the time between two specific classes”. As for question 3, I know that I have taken to Google images before to find inspiration. I would like to find other sources of inspiration though and hope to start looking at specific artist’s work through social media pages or YouTube videos for art that inspires me. If you have any artists that you would like to recommend to me, please leave them in a comment below!