As I write, my infant daughter plays beside me. She’s been ‘leaping’ this week; one of many ‘wonder weeks’ during her wondrous first year. She’s restless, a little cranky but mostly she’s in awe of the world around her.
She looks at everything in amazement, with fresh surprised eyes; like the world has just opened up to her. She’s fascinated by the simplest things; a doorknob, a dangling toy, the pattern on my dress. Her senses are heightened and she’s easily over stimulated, seemingly processing an abundance of sensory information all at once.
She marvels at her own fingers, at how they can move, often studying them with wide eyes and experimenting with what they can do. She’s investigating hand-eye coordination and how to grasp objects within her reach through trial and error. As her natural curiosity emerges, she’s wondering and investigating it all, learning through her inquiry and experimentation.
Watching the world through her eyes is fascinating. Every detail delightful, every sensation new, all objects are curiosities. She is in pursuit of understanding and skill, intrinsically. Her curiosity is driving her learning and it’s pure joy to observe.
I have learnt a lot about curiosity over the past few years, mostly from Wayne Craig and his colleagues at McRel. I find it captivating to observe curiosity in others, in learners, but never more so than in my daughter – emerging curiosity in its purest form – Joyful Hacking – I’ve never seen anything like it. It makes me ponder how our education system sucks this out of kids and how we might put it back, or better still, preserve it.
I’ve learnt about the types of curiosity and have gone on to share my new understandings and propositions for teaching and learning with my team. I understand that moving from exploratory curiosity to epistemic or intellectual curiosity is an innate skill, but it’s also a process that can be provoked or stifled by educators. I often ponder Alice and her adventures in Wonderland, viewing Alice as the supreme model of the curious child, when considering how to nurture Creative Curiosity in our learners. Perhaps now, my daughter and her wonderment will be the example that springs to my mind.
At Griffin, curiosity has been our linchpin since the early days, stemming from our study of _Educating Ruby_ by Guy Claxton. Cultivating curiosity in our classrooms is a work in progress, our practice maturing as we learn more. Through exploring Powerful Provocations, we’ve found a common language in which to talk about how we provoke our learners’ curiosity, how we can foster the Alice. The more we learn, the more curious we get. Curiosity begets curiosity.
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