Nature Journaling Tip #6: Focus on Inquiry

A nature journal is a simple yet effective tool for recording observations, organizing data, and making sense of what you observe. It is the most essential tool in a toolkit for productive inquiry and personal discovery, and can turn any contact with the natural world into an opportunity to learn.

Inquiry is the process of asking questions about things that are meaningful to you and answering them. Keeping a nature journal lends itself to inquiry as a model for problem solving.

Inquiry often happens in three phases, but each phase can include actions that characterize the other two. These phases are:

• Exploring. This is the phase of inquiry where you make observations and record your initial questions and ideas. While observing you actively engage all your senses. Journal keeping at this stage, especially drawing while watching an object or phenomenon occur, sparks questions that are likely to lead to productive inquiry - inquiry that will propel learning further.
• Data Gathering. As your inquiry progresses you continue to engage with your subject. Repeated observations over time yield far too much information to "keep in your head." Your journal becomes a database. It holds notes, lists, sketches, rough calculations, ideas, questions, discoveries and on-the-fly reflections that organize and redirect your research.
• Meaning Making. Here is where inquiry yields results just as a seed yields fruit. Some scientific inquiry results in new knowledge to be shared with other scientists. But the fruit of inquiry can take other forms as well. An artist's inquiry may yield a painting. A writer's inquiry may yield an essay. In any case the results of inquiry involve creating something usually shared with other people. Inquiry lays the groundwork for invention and innovation. Your journal is the place where you record discussions, data analysis, synthesis of ideas, all to make meaning of what you have observed. Making meaning from your observations also entails reflection on what you have learned, which invariably leads to new questions. And so the cycle of inquiry continues as your nature journal fills volume after volume.

Image by artist Derrel Blain. See more of Derrel's work.

Next week's tip: Into the Schoolyard and Back in the Classroom

Mark Baldwin is the Director of Education at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History (RTPI), a proud partner in National Environmental Education Week. Each year RTPI offers online workshops for educators interested in bringing nature journaling into the classroom. For more information visit www.rtpi.org.