As modern humans, we live within an intricate web of things we don’t understand. There’s a million gears churning to drive human civilization, and any single human is privy to the workings of only a few, so it is understandable that everyone walks around with a million questions in their head. Why do you have to drink 8 glasses of water a day? What is an Ombudsman? Who is the Government in debt to? Why is the person that invests your money called a broker?

This natural inquisitiveness lends itself handily to an instructional philosophy called inquiry-based learning. Adopting the analogy of a feature film, this pedagogical method bills the learner’s questions, ideas, and observations as the star cast, and the instructor’s instruction in a supporting role. The opening act of this movie might entail the instructor luring in the learner by asking them a question and villainously guiding them to an enticing answer, thus ensnaring the learner in a trap of their own curiosity. The second act could look something like the instructor daring the learner to dig into the area of interest and manufacture ideas of their own, followed quickly by the instructor withdrawing one of their guiding hands and allowing the learner to investigate their ideas using their own novel methods. Finally, the learner can take the reins into their own hands in a smashing third act and explore the subject at will, forming questions of their own and finding answers of their own.

Let’s wrap back to the question of “Who is the Government in debt to?”, which can be generalized to “What is debt, and what does it have to do with the economy?”. According to the CBA, there are upwards of 75 million credit cards in circulation in Canada, yet I suspect a majority of credit card owners don’t have a good understanding of the economic debt cycle.

This unique situation of people standing knee deep in debt yet not understanding it is a natural key-in for an inquiry-based learning approach.  The roaring popularity of  finance themed movies like The Big Short, Wolf of Wall Street, Margin Call etc. has demonstrated that questions related to this topic are immensely enticing and challenge people’s mental concepts of money and finance. This can potentially drive learners to use their own place in the debt cycle as an opportunity to investigate further and attempt to gain a solid understanding of the concept. As Zian mentions in his blog post about inquiry-based learning applied to an economic topic, an opening inquiry could simply aim to introduce basic economic concepts by making connections to real life, i.e helping learners realize how relevant the concept of debt and the debt cycle is to them, with subsequent stages of the learning approach helping learners resolve the role of their credit transactions in the short term debt cycle and eventually the long term debt cycle, ensuring they achieve at least a relational learning outcome.

References
  • Cba.ca. 2020. Credit Card Statistics. [online] Available at: <https://cba.ca/credit-card-statistics> [Accessed 31 May 2020].
  • Edu.gov.on.ca. 2020. [online] Available at: <http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/inspire/research/cbs_inquirybased.pdf> [Accessed 31 May 2020].
  • eLearning Industry. 2020. Instructional Design Models And Theories: Inquiry-Based Learning Model – Elearning Industry. [online] Available at: <https://elearningindustry.com/inquiry-based-learning-model> [Accessed 31 May 2020].