To begin to wrestle with any question of praxis in a classroom is to invite very foundational philosophical questions into the inquiry. In this exploration I ask the question, “If I provide choices for students in the classroom, will I begin to see spontaneous (perceived) engagement?” However, I need also to ask myself as an educator whether I believe already that providing choice is of value in itself. If this is to be a measure of my development of thinking, then I must figure out where I am beginning and plant my flag here. So, I present to you my underlying assumptions and beginning stances.

Full disclosure in a series of I statements:

• I worry that by not providing choice to students we make our classrooms inauthentic learning environments.

• I believe that curiosity is a natural human trait.

• I believe that there is something dehumanizing about not promoting or allowing autonomy in human beings, in this case, students in a classroom.

• I view much of the status quo in traditional transmissive education as a factory style, militaristic model of schooling, and I don’t like it.

• In short, I believe that choice is a requisite for creating a respectful and meaningful environment.

Clearly, I am beginning with some large, foundational beliefs. That being said, I am willing and ready to have these assumptions challenged, shaken, and changed by my inquiry research. Furthermore, these beginning points do not provide me with an answer to my question. While I believe that choice in the classroom is important theoretically, I do not know whether it will help encourage my seemingly disengaged students, or provoke spontaneous engagement. I embark upon this journey entirely unsure of where I will end up.

I am taking this time to establish the first leg of my compass because where I end up will necessarily be related to where I began. These assumptions I have mentioned have come from somewhere, and so I’ll take this time to mention a bit about where I think they may have been seeded.

I approach this inquiry with a background in Montessori education, where the respect for students as autonomous human beings is built in to the very system, from students planning their own days, to choosing their own workspaces and projects. It is important to note, too, that allowing students to be autonomous human beings in our classrooms, to make choices, to self-regulate, is a matter of respect. It is dehumanizing to not allow space for students to make decisions about their learning. It has been enormously frustrating to me to be always working with an entire class in lessons, knowing that in that class there is such a vast range of interest in the humanities and topics we are discussing, and such a range in skills. Some students want more, be that deeper discussion and greater challenge or more support. Some students want different: They are not interested in the topic at all, and the skills being taught could be done much more effectively with different material.This is, as far as I can tell, a recipe for disengagement and boredom. So my challenge becomes, as a teacher, to superimpose space for difference through my lessons onto a structure that I believe to be sub-optimal. The best way that I can see to do that is through cooperative learning and choice. It is these beliefs and background that have formed my question for inquiry. This is a crucial question for me to begin asking, as I will likely end up teaching in many neighbourhood-program classrooms.

I always had a lot of choice, one way or another, in my own education. I consider myself an engaged, life-long, self-regulated learner. I believe that this developed in me in part because of the choices I had. This is where I begin.