From Solved to Self-Defined: A Reflection on Questioning in Education — Epoche B2
Memorandum To: Dr Mertens, Faculty Study Adviser From: Lena Devos, second-year student, History and Philosophy Date: 15 October 2023 Subject: Reflection for the first-year mentoring file — how questions change between school and university The single adjustment first-year students find hardest, in my mentoring group, is that at university nobody hands you the question. You asked mentors to name that adjustment so we can raise it in the induction sessions rather than after the January results. Mine is not the reading load, and it is not referencing. It is the questions themselves — where they come from, and who is expected to produce them. Below I set out what changes, why the change is more than a step up in difficulty, and what I think one hour of induction could usefully do about it. 1. What school questions look like Begin with the thing being left behind, because it is more coherent than it looks from the other side. In my final year of secondary school, a mathematics or physics exercise arrived fully formed: solve for x, calculate the force on the beam. The task was to select the correct method from a known set and apply it accurately. This is not a criticism; you cannot argue about historical causation without first being able to read a chart. But it does train a particular reflex — wait for the question, then answer it — and that reflex is rewarded for six years. What I did not realise until this year is that the reflex has a name and a documented mechanism. The French mathematics educationist Guy Brousseau described what he called the didactic contract : the set of expectations, almost never stated aloud, about what the teacher will supply and what the pupil is obliged to do in return. Under the school contract the teacher guarantees that a question has been properly set, that the information needed is present, and that an answer exists; the pupil's side of the bargain is to produce one. The evidence that the contract, rather than the mathematics, governs what pupils do is a small experiment that has become famous in the field. Researchers at the IREM in Grenoble gave primary-school children a problem of the form: on a boat there are twenty-six sheep and ten goats; how old is the captain? The great majority produced a number, most often by adding or otherwise combining the two given quantities. They were not being stupid. They were honouring a contract which promises that a problem in a maths lesson is answerable from the figures supplied, and under that promise the only cooperative move is to combine them. The reflex I brought to university was that contract, still running. 2. What university questions look like The seminar that made the change visible to me did nothing dramatic; it simply withheld the first half of the contract. In my history seminar last month we were not asked what caused the French Revolution. We were given three cahiers de doléances from 1789 — the registers of grievances drawn up parish by parish, under a prescribed royal procedure, before the Estates-General met in May of that year — and asked what question these documents could honestly be made to answer. Half the group, myself included, spent the first hour trying to answer a question nobody had set. The word doing the work in that instruction is honestly , and it took the second hour to see why. Tens of thousands of these registers survive, but unevenly, and they were not written by the people whose grievances they record: a parish assembly's complaints were put into words by whoever in the village could write, often the curé or a notary, and model texts circulated in some regions so that neighbouring parishes produced suspiciously similar lists. They were also addressed upward, to the king, in the form of loyal petition. So 'what did French peasants believe in 1789?' is a question these documents cannot answer, because belief is precisely what the drafting process filters out. 'What grievances were considered sayable to the crown in this bailliage, and in what order of priority?' is a question they can answer, and Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff's content analysis of the cahiers shows how far that second question can be pushed when the whole surviving corpus is coded systematically. The work of the seminar was upstream of the answer: deciding what was worth asking, and what the sources could actually support. John Dewey put the general form of this a long time ago. In his account of inquiry, thinking does not begin with a question. It begins with a situation that is merely unsettled, and the first and most consequential act of inquiry is converting that situation into a stated problem — because the statement of the problem is what determines which evidence counts and what would settle the matter. On Dewey's picture the school exercise starts at step two. The seminar starts at step one. 3. Why this is difficult rather than merely different A student who cannot yet frame a question has no way of knowing whether they are making progress, and this is the specific harm, not the extra effort. In the philosophy seminar we spent an entire session on how to pose a question about justice that was neither so broad as to be unanswerable nor so narrow as to be trivial, and we left without a settled formulation. Several students read that as a wasted session. It was the opposite, but nothing in their previous six years had taught them to recognise the difference. The educational research literature has a description that fits this exactly. Jan Meyer and Ray Land call a threshold concept an idea whose acquisition transforms how a learner sees a subject, is difficult to reverse once acquired, and is troublesome on the way in. Their central observation for our purposes is what they call the liminal state: the period during which a learner has left the old understanding and not yet arrived at the new one, oscillates, produces work that mimics understanding without having it, and — crucially — has no reliable internal