“You Have to Absorb Yourself in It”: Using Inquiry and Reflection to Promote Student Learning and Self-knowledge

Inspired by inquiry-guided learning and critical self-reflection as pedagogical approaches, we describe exercises that encourage students to develop critical thinking skills through inquiry and reflective writing. Students compile questions and reflections throughout the course and, at the end of the term, use their writings for a comprehensive analytic self-reflection that examines their intellectual and sociological growth. Following Schwalbe’s (2008) urging to emphasize sociological thinking over disciplinary nuances in introductory courses, we describe several complementary methods for teaching students how to think like sociologists. We detail five inquiry exercises and three reflection exercises that build up to the final analytic reflection essay. The unique value of these exercises is that students not only engage the course material throughout the course but also learn to examine their own writing as data. In doing so, students learn to value the process of learning, inquiry, and critical self-reflection while acquiring and constructing self-knowledge.