Curiosity in Learning

Critical Curiosity: Surrealism and the History and Legacy of its Method
Dr Donna Roberts (Independent Scholar), Helsinki

These days, largely due to the writings of Michel Foucault, “curiosity” has become a term seemingly loaded with epistemological edginess. The term is so ubiquitous that it can be found anywhere from publicity for Ripley’s Believe it or Not! museum to the website of the Welcome Collection; a term that is used, basically, with the hope of inciting a certain form of passing interest. However, thanks to a host of scholars who have developed a rich history of this term, we know that curiosity is understood to have played a crucial cognitive role from Aristotelian natural philosophy through to the most current scientific method.
It is arguable, however, that a critical awareness of these two strands of curiosity – relating to the appeal (and taxonomical intrigue) of rarity and its incitement of the cognitive drive – was developed considerably earlier than recent discourse might suggest, that is, within the surrealist milieu in the first half of the twentieth century. Foucault’s familiarity with the work of André Breton, Georges Bataille, and Roger Caillois suggests a fairly linear legacy from the varieties of surrealist method and analysis through to contemporary discourse on curiosity. Breton utilized curiosity in terms of the marvelous, as a means to challenging dominant ideas about the proper objects of knowledge; Bataille drew on his scholastic training to develop an aggressively affective visual method that exploited the monstrous appeal and vice of curiosity in a critique of European cultural and philosophical idealism; while Caillois turned his attention to curiosities of nature as a means of exploring disturbing continuities between human and non-human behaviour.
The exhibitions and periodicals organized within the surrealist milieu have long been interpreted as creative and provocative forms of cabinets of curiosity, utilizing the surrealist method of juxtaposition to produce lyrical and unsettling relationships that question orthodoxies concerning the order of things. The combining of heteroclite images, objects and texts was developed according to key critical intentions: a de-centering of European civilization, an assault on the idea of a dispassionate aesthetic, and a reconfiguring of the marvelous as part of a refusal of the reductions of positivist science.
With a view to contributing to the historiographical interests of the conference, this paper will examine how the surrealists elevated the notion of curiosity into a radical form of enquiry that would become key to the movement’s broad political, historical, ethnographic, and cultural critique. Given that the coherency of the surrealist programme and its abiding political commitments provided structure and critical force to its engagement with curiosity as both a boundless cognitive drive and a potentially subversive property of material culture, I will ask whether, in lacking such a coherent programme, much of the contemporary engagement in curiosity (thinking of yet another stuffed animal) risks coming across as an uncritical, nostalgic, fetishistic, sublimating, and overly-aestheticised indulgence in artefacts and the pat elaborations of the ‘boundary-breaking’ rhetoric of inter-disciplinarity.

Inquisitiveness is a paradigm example of an intellectual virtue. Despite some extensive work on the characterisation of the intellectual virtues however (e.g. Roberts and Wood, 2007; Baehr 2011) no detailed treatment of the virtue of inquisitiveness has been forthcoming in the recent literature. This paper offers a characterisation of the virtue of inquisitiveness considered within the framework of educating for intellectual virtue. As such, it presents the case in support of educating for inquisitiveness. The characterisation offered seeks to highlight in particular the distinctive relationship that inquisitiveness bears to the activity of questioning. When considered within the context of educating for intellectual virtue, this distinctive relationship is seen to have particular significance. The activity of questioning is a ubiquitous feature of everyday learning. Young children in particular are often observed to be avid question-askers and this natural tendency is manifest in a wide variety of contexts including the school classroom. There is, therefore, a natural association between inquisitiveness and learning. On this basis it is argued, the natural inclination exhibited by young children towards questioning provides us with a valuable tool in the promotion of intellectual flourishing. Moreover, the distinctive relationship that inquisitiveness bears to questioning highlights its special significance in the intellectually virtuous life in virtue of its defining role in the initiation of intellectually virtuous inquiry. Insofar as the nurturing of intellectually virtuous inquiry is a central aim of the project of educating for intellectual virtue, this places inquisitiveness centre-stage. As such, inquisitiveness is a primary intellectual virtue to educate for.

Özet
Araştırmanın amacı, ortaokul öğrencilerinin sosyal bilgiler dersine yönelik meraklarını tespit etmektir. Bu amaca uygun olarak araştırma temel nitel araştırma şeklinde gerçekleştirilmiştir. Araştırmanın çalışma grubunu, amaçlı örnekleme yöntemiyle tespit edilen, Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı’na bağlı farklı ortaokullarda görev yapan gönüllü 8 Sosyal Bilgiler öğretmeni oluşturmuştur. Araştırmada veriler görüşme tekniği ile toplanmıştır. Elde edilen veriler betimsel analize tabi tutulmuştur. Araştırma sonucunda, Okul ve Merak, Sosyal Bilgiler ve Merak, Ünite ve Merak ile Merak Uyandırıcılar olmak üzere 4 farklı temaya ulaşılmıştır. Derslerin günlük hayatla ilişkili olması ile derslerde kullanılan teknolojik materyallerin öğrencilerin okul merakını olumlu yönde etkilediği, sınıf dışı etkinliklerin öğrencilerin merak duygularını harekete geçiren bir unsur olduğu, sosyal bilgiler öğretmenlerinin sahip oldukları mesleki bilgi ve becerileri ile öğrencilerin bizzat kendileri tarafından oluşturdukları materyallerin merak uyandırıcı unsurlar olduğu ve son olarak öğrencilerin sosyal bilgiler dersinde tarih ve coğrafya konuları ile ilişkili ünitelerde meraklı olduğu kısmen de vatandaşlık konularına merak ettikleri görülmüştür.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Sosyal bilgiler, Merak, ortaokul öğrencileri

Abstract
The aim of the research is to determine the curiosity of secondary school students towards social studies lesson. In accordance with this purpose, the research has been conducted as a basic qualitative research. The study group of the study consisted of 8 social studies teachers, who were determined by purposeful sampling method, and volunteered to work in different secondary schools of the Ministry of National Education. Data were collected by interview technique. The data were analyzed descriptively. As a result of the research, 4 different themes such as School and Curiosity, Social Studies and Curiosity, Unit and Curiosity and Curiosities were reached. It is concluded that the lessons related to daily life positively affect the school curiosity of the students. It is another result of the study that out-of-class activities are a factor that stimulates students' curiosity. It has been found that the knowledge and skills of social studies teachers possessed by students and the materials created by the students themselves are intriguing. It was observed that students were curious about the subjects related to history and geography subjects in the social studies lesson and partly interested in citizenship issues.
Keywords: Social studies, curiosity, secondary school students

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