Inquiry Alive! [CD-ROM]

William C. Bruce (Author), Jean K. Bruce (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From the Author

INQUIRY ALIVE! places its emphasis on examples and exercises. The text core involves building thinking skills through scientific inquiry. The book’s final instructional pages end with words from the poet Annie Dillard, about what happens when you’re "lifted and struck," as a bell. Although Dillard was writing about nature, I know that when you effectively use inquiry methods you breathe again, struck with new strengths and abilities to taste, to touch, to hear, and to think, things you cannot wait to share.

About the Author

Professor William C. Bruce is the main author of INQUIRY ALIVE! Professor Bruce has over thirty years experience teaching, using the mystery and power of inquiry, based on example discrepant events. Professor Bruce is the author of nine textbooks and dozens of articles in professional publications. He wrote his first inquiry books, in 1992, Alpha Publishing Co., Inc., Annapolis, Maryland. He has presented papers at national conferences, served as consultant for international corporations, and is considered a foremost authority on inquiry teaching and learning. Professor Bruce remains one of education's resolute inspirations, always keeping in mind the active connection between building ideas, context, and content.

Product Details

• CD-ROM: 112 pages
• Publisher: Home Tree Media (October 12, 2003)
• ISBN-10: 0970480148
• ISBN-13: 978-0970480149
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,067,343 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

According to family, I started out as an adventurer, from the time I could crawl. By the age of nine, I helped round up cattle on horseback. Although we seldom dogged the trail of a lost cow for more than two days, I always wanted to ride until I wobbled when I dismounted. Most of the cow poking happened just a few miles from the town where I spent most of my early years, Selma, Alabama.

Before long, I escorted my two older brothers on marches to Blue Girth Swamp. You'll find Blue Girth on the outskirts of Selma. We frog gigged in Blue Girth, sometimes in storms, always at night. I wielded a flashlight and long-handled frog-gigging fork. We ate the frog legs some hungry nights over a campfire. As we hunted down frogs, I imagined the flashlight, as my torch. I imagined the fork, my magical wand. I also pictured the Civil War. I tried to forget about Union Maj. Gen. James Wilson and Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Forrest in their battle for Selma. Instead, I invented women generals fighting with words of peace so powerful soldiers threw down their weapons; my soldiers embraced civil rights, sang and danced.

One night about 2 A.M., on a dare, a few months after my fourteenth birthday, I climbed the Selma water tower. With every step up that tower ladder, I muttered, "Big deal." But, I imagined a deep swimming pool below.

I also confess: although my father was the man everyone in town had to take their driver's license test from, he never knew that I'd been driving since the age of ten. Really, I was seven the first time I drove my father's Highway Patrol car. I drove it, a new patrol car, into a fishing pond; I found the emergency brake just as one front tire splashed into the muddy water.

My adventures also happened over notebooks, and behind typewriters, in my imagination. Today, I still write fiction and poetry, but my work centers on non-fiction.

I've coauthored six textbooks, I blog, publish, and make films. My husband and I spend much of our time working on a documentary, Selma: Bridge over Troubled Waters.

My earlier years in Alabama give me personal knowledge, a heightened level, I suppose, regarding the Southern aspect. Time, trial, and error, shaped my life providing the basics for me. Often, my work (even the discrepant event lessons) starts with me conjuring up someone caught in a mental swamp.