Essential Questions and Working with 3-D Forms in Wood

Habitat 67, Montreal, Moshe Safdie

Essential questions that probe for deeper meaning and set the stage for further questioning are ones that foster the development of critical thinking skills and higher order capabilities such as problem-solving and understanding complex systems. Comprehensive and well crafted questions can ground intellectual pursuits and give students a sense of direction, purpose, and relevance as they are engage in the work of the subject. Good questions direct students to dig deeper into content and processes, delve deeper into a subject. More importantly they propel students to learn to ask their own questions and within a subject they help focus content on the critical and important parts of that subject.

I have to ask myself what is the real purpose of an educated mind and what does an educated mind do? I am reminded of Paulo Freire and his pedagogy of liberation, in one of his principles he states ".....the former are the subjects of the act of teaching; the latter are subjects of learning. The former learn as they teach; the latter teach as they learn. They are all subjects of the knowing process, which involves teaching and learning".

As we move into handling a different media we bring with us all our prior experience and with our contact, both sensory and cognitive, new questions. What are we looking at? What are we seeing? How is this media different from the one we were exploring before? How is it the same? What can be done with it? Why do you think that?