ABSTRACT
What is inquiry? Dewey has a great deal to say regarding this question. Throughout his writings, he makes numerous references to, and offers many characterizations of, inquiry. In A Common Faith (1933/1986), he calls it “an unseen power … of the ideal” (p. 18). In How We Think (1910/1978), he speaks of the inquiry process as one in which we enter a contract as thinkers, as something that culminates and is ultimately woven into a “coherent fabric” (p. 245). In that same book, Dewey (1910/1978) talks about the need to be playful when it comes to inquiring so that we can achieve a “largeness and imaginativeness of vision” (p. 290). In The Quest for Certainty (1929/1984), Dewey helps us to understand that through the inquiry process, knowledge becomes a verb, something active and used for some purpose, by comparing it with the work a tool does rather than the tool itself.
