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Writer's pictureDaryl

Reflections on Seely's Questing Disposition

Updated: Oct 19, 2019

One of the missions in Week 9 of #INTE5340 was to view and consider John Seely Brown’s notion of the Questing Disposition and apply it our own learning in this class. Brown and Thomas (2008) wrote, based on “Gilbert Ryle's notion of contingency and context, Michael Polanyi's idea of the tacit dimension (more specifically, what Polanyi described as "attending from" and "attending to"), and John Dewey's understanding of inquiry”, that dispositions embracing the notion of inquiry inform us how someone might approach a problem as well as how they may view provided or discovered resources to solve the problem. They refer to this as dispositions of productive inquiry, and they posit “The emphasis on productive inquiry is on knowing how to use the answers one finds as resources in future contexts, often reshaping them to meet new demands or situations.” Furthermore, when they apply these ideas to education they argue the importance that productive inquiry challenges us not to focus only on the final answer, but rather to personalize the questions and discover their relevance in order to continue the process of inquiry. If disposition is a tendency, rather than a response, we need to understand students’ propensity for using resources for gaining knowledge. This should inform us how learning might function in a rapidly changing world.


As we delve deeper into Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and Dan Harmon’s Story Circle, the Questing Disposition becomes more apparent. On our journey, we discover new resources which will help us to complete our quest, and knowing there are multiple ways for solving problems, we learn something new which we might apply in the future to solve another problem laid before us. While there is an endpoint to this quest (end of semester), we will have acquired new tool sets we can apply in new ways on future quests.


Following our Spring Break, I would like to begin looking at ways in which Instructional Design teams and eLearning authors use digital storytelling as a tool for designed learning. What are some real-world examples, in education and in business? What tools are used? What methods are used for evaluating success knowing there are multiple ways to solve problems?


Citations: Brown, J. S., & Thomas, D. (2008). The Power of Dispositions. Ubiquity, 2008(November). doi:10.1145/1472987.1472988

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