“Essential questions” are broad, thought-provoking inquiries that sit at the core of a discipline or subject. These questions cannot be answered with a mere definition and require thinking, reflection, and discussion. Essential questions help steer inquiry and exploration of a topic and are used in instructional design to drive the writing of a lesson.
Essential questions are open-ended, thought provoking, relevant to a discipline or area of study. They are cross-disciplinary and thrive to be timeless.
In the development of information literacy competencies for Art, Architecture, and Design, ARLIS/NA identified a number of essential questions.
There are a few that really stood out to me:
- How are the creative and research processes intertwined and informed by one another in your discipline? For you personally?
- How are your research questions grounded in the existing state of topical knowledge, unsolved problems, and personal experience?
- What role does personal experience and understanding play in the research and creative process?
These were just a few of the questions that led to the listed competencies. We are always talking about SMART goals, and the competencies are definitely along the lines of SMART goals — can the learner identify a source, etc. The essential questions seem…more airy…less precise, but they are also more interesting.
In order to really know what is happening in the art classroom, maybe going back to the essential questions is the way to go.
Art of Information 