The Inquiry
The life cycle of possibility can be understood with the concept of inquiry. The inquiry became John Dewey’s crucial concept, where it essentially invites the learner to an “intoxicated sense of adventure” (Dewey and Ross, 2008) by “doing things and trying ideas out” (Dewey, 1910). Dewey defines inquiry to be “the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole” (Dewey & Nagel, 2008). Usually, in the face of a problematic, unbalanced situation, inquiry is the call for the work of reconstruction to take place. It does not anticipate total recollection before the analysis of the problem. Rather, it is an open query of the experienced experience that may involve adjustments of the elements that contribute to the imbalance experienced for a resolution to emerge. Dewey sees the process of inquiry as one that is innate and observable. With each inquiry, one projects and moves meaning-making forward for both oneself and for others as well. The experimental innateness of inquiry is of a disciplined search for possibility though not impaired by chronic fixtures of probability. Dewey resolves these contrasting elements through his removal of a prioi to value the experience of now and its unique ability to observe, reflect and experiment to disrupt habitual ritualistic structures of living to project new pathways. "There is no such thing as genuine knowledge and fruitful understanding except as the offspring of doing”, Dewey says in Democracy and Education (1916).
There is an emphasis on continuous searching for the utmost authentic possibility of an egalitarian mode of living for all persons in the nature of inquiry, one that assumes a horizontal engagement where there is no completion. If that is so, the act of horizoning can be seen as a certain universal hermeneutic experience like a story that never ends. Inquiry acts upon the continual edges of knowledge where it feels, asks questions, hypotheses, tests, imagines, and discovers (Lowery & Jenlink, 2019). Its search for openings of possibility embodies knowledge production as one that is active and living and not imprisoned in its spatial and temporal situations. Ideas are accidents of time that arise at the intersection of humans and technology in a dialectical relationship for a sense of preparedness that is no longer tethered to prevalent, fixed knowledge. These possibilities are found only after the act of leaping, as they are revealed in the instant of the jump as “actions produce dreams and ideas, not the reverse” (Ross, 2019). Though Ross does not express this explicitly, she seems to be elevating the status of inquiry to an existential status where the tenets of utopian experimentation are founded. Hence, the Praxis of the living imaginary is found in experiments of creating the infrastructures for the future we want together with the joys, disappointments, pain, fear and anguish of the process of living with the uncertain, the doubt and the unknown. The capacity to inquire in the face of these moods that might motivate one’s being to seek fugitively from the inquiry itself is to develop curiosity as the expectation of finding something new through inquiry (Caspary, 2019). Curiosity as inquiry’s partner might enable one to get through the incommensurability of the experience of imbalance.
Inquiry’s purpose overlaps with utopia’s purpose in the continuous search for the utmost authentic possibility of an egalitarian existence. The acquisition of the utmost possibility is to constantly and continuously be at home in the homelessness presented by being at the edge of knowledge. Being-towards-death is a human being’s utmost possibility. When human beings are taken as learning beings or meaning-making beings, it posits a perspective where the existential being’s search for meaning-making through inquiry can be taken as utopia itself: the process of existence is utopia.
Holding this notion, do human being and learning being exist united? My reflections on my experiences over the last decade as an educator and leader in non-traditional early classrooms have observed a certain ironic divide between the human being and the learning being in young children. Suppose children are seen as human beings, would this not imply that children share in these existential predicaments, making them susceptible to an existential injury with this separation? This separation (of the human being and the learning being) reduces the status of children to the ‘child’, where their inquiry is becoming co-opted by an Other (curriculum, teacher, school) albeit with progressive methods and pedagogies. The utmost possibility of the Other is disclosed here and the human learning being, the Child, is very often nowhere to be found, and with that, their utmost possibility is undisclosed. Thus, it can be said that for the Other, the Child does not exist in the early classroom. Here, possibility is disrupted and distorted which leaves both the human being and the learning being individually displaced. They become unrecognisable to one another if and/or when they meet which makes reconciliation difficult. This sets out a twofold task that happens in the unoccupied shadows of the possible: one, to reunite the disjointed existential being together (putting Humpty Dumpty — possibility — back together again) and two, to illuminate the conditions of possible being.