what is critical inquiry in education

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Critical Inquiry and Inquiry-Oriented Education

Opinion: K.P. Mohanan, Professor, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune

Human violence has multiple roots. Someone who stabs another in a fit of road-rage is acting under blind emotions. Someone who cannot kill humans but is prepared to kill animals has not expanded the scope of their ethical considerations beyond humans. And someone who wages war against another country is guided by ideological or economic factors, unaffected by ethics. To deal with violence, then, education must incorporate strands that aim at the emotional, ethical and intellectual foundations for peace.

Educating emotion requires helping the young liberate themselves from negative emotions such as anger, hostility, hatred, cruelty, intolerance, selfishness and competitiveness, while strengthening positive emotions such as empathy, compassion, love, and the spirit of altruism.

Educating the intellect for peace involves helping learners protect themselves from ideologies of violence. It should also empower them to change systems and practices that either promote violence or fail to prevent violence.

Ethical foundations draw on both emotion and intellect. Enriching the natural ethical instincts is a matter of emotions. Expanding the scope of ethical considerations is a matter of both emotions and reasoning. And connecting ethical values and principles to one’s actions and practices is a matter of reasoning.

In sum, we need a form of education that combines the emotional and the intellectual.  In this article, my concern is with the intellectual part.

Intellectual education needs to include not only the information and knowledge to work towards a non-violent world but also the abilities of critical thinking and inquiry to investigate the causes of violence, and to find ways to dissolve those causes. This means that Inquiry-Oriented Education (IOE), which seeks to develop the capacity for rational inquiry, has to be recognised as an important strand of education. What follows are my reflections on the role of rational inquiry in education and of critical inquiry as a specific form of rational inquiry.

What is Rational Inquiry?

Inquiry is the  investigation of a question on the basis of our own experience and reasoning, to look for an answer and arrive at a conclusion.

It involves:

• Questions  whose answers we wish to find out
• Methodological strategies  to look for answers
• Answers to the questions,  and  conclusions  based on them
• Rational justification  (proof, evidence, arguments) for the conclusions
• Thinking critically about  our own or others’ conclusions and justification

Rational inquiry  is inquiry that is committed to the following axioms:

• Rejecting Logical Contradictions : We must reject statements that are logically contradictory
• Accepting Logical Consequences : If we accept a set of statements, then we must also accept their logical consequences

By ‘logical contradiction’, we mean a combination of a statement and its negation. Thus, the statement that the earth is flat and the earth is not flat constitutes a logical contradiction. A logical consequence of a set of statements is a conclusion derived from them through logic. Thus, the conclusion that all humans are vertebrates is a logical consequence of these statements: (i) all humans are primates; (ii) all primates are mammals; and (iii) all mammals are vertebrates.

For readers who wish to go beyond this brief sketch, a wide range of examples of rational inquiry for school and college education are available at  www.schoolofthinq.com

Inquiry-Oriented Education, which seeks to develop the capacity for rational inquiry, has to be recognised as an important strand of education.

What is Critical Inquiry?

There are many situations where we do not realise our ignorance. We also take many beliefs and practices for granted, without questioning. When we subject such domains to critical thinking, we are pursuing  a special kind of rational inquiry, called  critical inquiry, which begins with doubting and questioning what has been taken for granted (analogous to ‘interrogating/cross-examining’ an ‘expert witness’ including ourselves) and demonstrating that we don’t know what we think we know.

Questions for critical inquiry are triggered by critical thinking.  Critical thinking is a set of mental processes for evaluating the merit of something . ‘Merit’ here could be the truth of a statement (e.g., the statement, ‘That the earth is round’ is true.), the  usefulness  of a product, action, practice, or policy to achieve a given goal (e.g., death penalty to effectively deter crime), the  ethical desirability  of an action, practice, or policy (e.g., the ethical rightness of the death penalty), the  beauty  of a work of art (e.g., Is da Vinci’s Mona Lisa a great painting?), or the  value  of something that we (ought to) strive for (e.g., we ought to liberate ourselves from anger and hatred).

Mathematical and scientific inquiries offer fruitful emotion-free terrains for the practice of critical inquiry.

Examples of Critical Inquiry

Critical inquiry into issues of terrorism, communal violence, forced migrations, xenophobia, nationalist and religious ideologies that promote violence, and the relation between economic policies and violence, are of direct relevance to education for peace. Such issues, however, are emotionally charged. They might be seductive for beginners, but precisely because of their emotional appeal, there is a danger that when investigating them, feelings replace thinking and assertions of personal opinions replace rational conclusions.

My experience suggests that for beginners to engage with such topics with adequate detachment, clarity and rigour, they need to strengthen their mental equipment in two ways: by striving for emotional maturity, in order to detach feelings from reflection and reasoning; and by strengthening and sharpening their intellectual capacity, using topics that would not create emotional storms.

Mathematical and scientific inquiries offer fruitful emotion-free terrains for the practice of critical inquiry. Let me sketch an example.

Suppose we begin a class activity for eighth graders with an innocent-sounding question:  How many angles does a triangle have?  The textbook answer is: Three. We can now initiate critical inquiry:  What is an angle such that triangles have three angles and rectangles have four?

Most novices would think of this as a trivial question. But then, the function of critical inquiry is to challenge complacency.

What is an angle?  A student’s answer might be: “If two straight lines meet in such a way that they do not form a single straight line, what lies between them is an angle.” If so, the combination of two straight lines in Fig. 1 forms an angle, but not in Fig. 2.

What is a right angle? What is an acute angle? What is an obtuse angle? What is a straight angle?  The standard textbook answers are: “A right angle measures 90º; an acute angle is less than a right angle; an obtuse angle is more than a right angle (but less than two right angles); and a straight angle is two right angles.”

We now proceed to rigorous reasoning. Given these ‘definitions’, it follows that angle ABC in Fig. 1 is an obtuse angle; while angle DEF in Fig. 2 is a staight angle. Since any straight line can be viewed as being made up of two straight lines at a straight angle, there is a straight angle at every point in a straight line.

How many angles does a straight line have?  Since every finite straight line has infinitely many points, it has infinitely many straight angles. Therefore, it has infinitely many angles. Since a triangle is made of three straight lines, it has infinitely many angles. This conclusion negates the textbook answer to the question we started with.

We now have to either accept the conclusion that triangles and rectangles have infinitely many angles, or re-define the concept of angle such that we abandon the concept of straight angle from the textbook.

If schools around the world could engage in discussions pursuing rational inquiry into principles and concepts of ethics, there would perhaps be far less violence in the world.

This begins an inquiry into questions whose answers we realise we don’t know:  What is an angle?

This example illustrates the strategy of ‘problematisation’ in critical inquiry: we begin with questions on what we think we know and take for granted; we engage critically with the answer; and realise that we don’t know what we thought we knew, triggering further inquiry.

As I said, math and science offer rich terrains for emotion-free practice of critical inquiry. Once learners acquire the necessary sharpness and strength of mind, they can be guided into critical inquiry in emotion-riddled terrains. We now explore two such examples.

2. Freedom Fighters and Terrorists

We give students the following hypothetical story.

Suppose a country, Arraya, rules over an island, Parumbi. The people of Parumbi don’t want Arraya to govern them, but the people of Arraya want Parumbi under them. Parumbians take up arms to achieve their goal. Their supporters describe them as ‘freedom fighters’, and their activity as an ‘independence struggle’. But the government of Arraya and its supporters describe them as ‘terrorists’, and their activity as ‘terrorism’.

We then give them the following real world story:

An article, “Terrorism, Not Freedom Struggle” (The Times of India, 10 August 2001) stated that “rejecting Islamabad’s description of terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir as freedom struggle,” India’s external affairs minister said that under no circumstance should India accept “Islamabad’s attempt to confer cross-border terrorism a kind of diplomatic legitimacy  1  …” Pakistan’s newspaper Business Recorder quoted Harry Truman as having warned that “once a government is committed to silencing the voice of dissent, it has only one way to go. To employ increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” It went on to say: “Nothing illustrates the Indian policy, vis-à-vis occupied Kashmir, better than the above quoted remark of the American leader 2 .”

The students’ task is to spell out how we would distinguish between ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘terrorists’ and to define ‘terrorism’ and ‘independence struggle’ such that we can engage in a rational debate on whether a particular movement qualified as an independence struggle or as terrorism.

3. Nation and Nationalism

Activity 1 Write down the answers to the following questions: What is your nationality? Do you feel good when you hear your national anthem or see your national flag? Are there nations that you dislike or are hostile to? Write the names of those nations.

Activity 2 Now consider the following question: What is a nation?

Discussion : Two meanings of the term ‘nation’ emerged:

• People-nation : nation as a people united by a shared ancestry, language, and culture. (e.g. ‘Naga-nation,’ ‘Navaho- nation,’ ‘Palestine as a stateless nation’). People-nation prompts loyalty and, devotion to the people with shared ancestry, language, and culture.
• State-nation : nation as a government that rules a population in a given geographical region. (e.g. India, Pakistan, Vietnam, South Korea, United States of America, Australia, Nigeria, Argentina, and Germany). State-nations are results of war, conquest and power negotiations; they don’t require shared ethnicity, language, or culture.

A promising avenue for emotion-education is perhaps something along the lines of mindfulness meditation: ‘looking’ internally at the contents of one’s own experience . . .

Activity 3 Consider the concept of nationalism : We may define it as: a form of collective identity that prompts loyalty and devotion to  one’s nation .

Discussion : Given the two distinct concepts of nation, we needed to recognise the corresponding concepts of nationalism: people-nationalism and state-nationalism. People-nationalism might perceive the rulers as ‘foreign’, prompting the political separation of one’s people from those rulers. State-nationalism would perceive those involved in that separation as ‘traitors’. State-nationalism then is loyalty and devotion to one’s rulers and is identical to ‘patriotism’.

Activity 4 Let us go back to the questions we asked earlier: What is your nationality? Do you feel good when you hear your national anthem or national flag?

Discussion : Is your concept of nationality grounded in people-nation or state-nation? Do you feel good when you hear the national anthem or see the national flag? Do you feel patriotism rise in your heart? Does that feeling come from loyalty to the people, or to the state?

What would your nationality be now?

Which national anthem and national flag would produce feelings of patriotism in your grandchildren? Which nations are your grandchildren likely to hate?

Now answer the same questions by assuming that there were no wars anywhere in the world after the tenth century, and that the political map continued without change till today.

After thinking through these questions, go back to the concepts of state-nation and peoples-nation and write a one-page reflection on the concepts of nation, nationality, nationalism, and patriotism, and the role of violence in the origin and evolution of nations.

An Example of Ethical Inquiry

As a form of rational inquiry, ethical inquiry seeks to help develop the capacity to construct and evaluate ethical theories at individual and collective levels and to deduce the ethical judgements derived from those theories.

In a class session that I did for 6th Graders in Pune, India, the children came up with this ethical principle:  It is immoral to kill humans and other creatures . During the subsequent discussion, one child said that the principle doesn’t apply to enemies. The entire class agreed that it is okay to kill enemies. The principle was revised as:  It is immoral to kill fellow creatures other than enemies .

Some students even suggested that killing enemies is our ethical duty. This resulted in the following dialogue:

At this point, they were no longer sure about their position on enemies. I gave them a few minutes to discuss the problem in groups and come up with a concept of ‘enemy’ such that killing enemies is okay. After some discussion, most groups came up with the following statements:

Those who want to kill others are our enemies.

Those enemies exist in both India and Pakistan.

I would have liked to raise the question: Is it morally right to kill someone who has killed another? This could have taken us to fairly complex issues like mercy-killing, honour-killing, war, abortion and death penalty. I did not pursue that line of inquiry, for I wasn’t sure if it was age-appropriate for the children.

If schools around the world could engage in discussions of this kind, pursuing rational inquiry into principles and concepts of ethics, there would perhaps be far less violence in the world.

  Contemplative Inquiry

As mentioned earlier, the education of emotions has an important role to play in minimising human violence. A promising avenue for emotion-education is perhaps something along the lines of mindfulness meditation: ‘looking’ internally at the contents of one’s own experience, including sensory and non-sensory experience, as well as the experience of emotions. Meditative techniques such as attending to breathing, body scan, loving-kindness and observing thought are forms of looking at the inner world 3 .

The so-called  contemplative inquiry  in this tradition is a form of rational inquiry that takes the results of such introspection as the grounds of inquiry to arrive at rational conclusions about oneself. This allows us to address questions as, “Am I a covert racist?” “Am I as ethical as I think?”, “Do I carry hatred in me?”, as part of inquiry into a fundamental question: “Who am I?”

Instead of merely experiencing emotions such as anger or hostility, we can employ contemplative inquiry with the rational-perceptual part of the mind examining with equanimity the emotional suffering part. The outcome of attention then forms the basis for rational investigation of oneself.

Inquiry-Oriented Education

Helping the young to develop the capacity to engage in these diverse modes of rational inquiry, combined with practices that enhance positive emotions and dissolve negative ones, is an imperative that institutionalised education can no longer afford to ignore in today’s world. Mathematical, scientific, conceptual, ethical and contemplative inquiries play significant roles in this enterprise, which would involve incorporating the strand of Inquiry-Oriented Education into schooling at the primary, secondary, as well as tertiary levels. UNESCO MGIEP has currently undertaken such a move in a collaborative endeavour with ThinQ 4  in its LIBRE programme.

1   http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Terrorism-not-freedom-struggle-Jaswant/articleshow/1086523490.cms

2   http://www.brecorder.com/index.php?option=com_news&view=single&id=1108304

3  http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_choose_a_type_of_mindfulness_meditation

4   www.schoolofthinq.com

K.P. Mohanan  received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and taught at the University of Texas in Austin, MIT, Stanford University and the National University of Singapore (NUS). At NUS, he initiated the General Education Programme for undergraduate students and, as part of this programme, created a web course on Academic Knowledge and Inquiry.

In January 2011, he moved to IISER-Pune, where he created a three-course package on rational inquiry, covering scientific, mathematical, and conceptual inquiries. He is currently engaged in developing courses and programmes on different types of inquiry-based learning for high school and college students.

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Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Integrating Critical Thinking Into the Classroom

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(This is the second post in a three-part series. You can see Part One here .)

The new question-of-the-week is:

What is critical thinking and how can we integrate it into the classroom?

Part One ‘s guests were Dara Laws Savage, Patrick Brown, Meg Riordan, Ph.D., and Dr. PJ Caposey. Dara, Patrick, and Meg were also guests on my 10-minute BAM! Radio Show . You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.

Today, Dr. Kulvarn Atwal, Elena Quagliarello, Dr. Donna Wilson, and Diane Dahl share their recommendations.

‘Learning Conversations’

Dr. Kulvarn Atwal is currently the executive head teacher of two large primary schools in the London borough of Redbridge. Dr. Atwal is the author of The Thinking School: Developing a Dynamic Learning Community , published by John Catt Educational. Follow him on Twitter @Thinkingschool2 :

In many classrooms I visit, students’ primary focus is on what they are expected to do and how it will be measured. It seems that we are becoming successful at producing students who are able to jump through hoops and pass tests. But are we producing children that are positive about teaching and learning and can think critically and creatively? Consider your classroom environment and the extent to which you employ strategies that develop students’ critical-thinking skills and their self-esteem as learners.

Development of self-esteem

One of the most significant factors that impacts students’ engagement and achievement in learning in your classroom is their self-esteem. In this context, self-esteem can be viewed to be the difference between how they perceive themselves as a learner (perceived self) and what they consider to be the ideal learner (ideal self). This ideal self may reflect the child that is associated or seen to be the smartest in the class. Your aim must be to raise students’ self-esteem. To do this, you have to demonstrate that effort, not ability, leads to success. Your language and interactions in the classroom, therefore, have to be aspirational—that if children persist with something, they will achieve.

Use of evaluative praise

Ensure that when you are praising students, you are making explicit links to a child’s critical thinking and/or development. This will enable them to build their understanding of what factors are supporting them in their learning. For example, often when we give feedback to students, we may simply say, “Well done” or “Good answer.” However, are the students actually aware of what they did well or what was good about their answer? Make sure you make explicit what the student has done well and where that links to prior learning. How do you value students’ critical thinking—do you praise their thinking and demonstrate how it helps them improve their learning?

Learning conversations to encourage deeper thinking

We often feel as teachers that we have to provide feedback to every students’ response, but this can limit children’s thinking. Encourage students in your class to engage in learning conversations with each other. Give as many opportunities as possible to students to build on the responses of others. Facilitate chains of dialogue by inviting students to give feedback to each other. The teacher’s role is, therefore, to facilitate this dialogue and select each individual student to give feedback to others. It may also mean that you do not always need to respond at all to a student’s answer.

Teacher modelling own thinking

We cannot expect students to develop critical-thinking skills if we aren’t modeling those thinking skills for them. Share your creativity, imagination, and thinking skills with the students and you will nurture creative, imaginative critical thinkers. Model the language you want students to learn and think about. Share what you feel about the learning activities your students are participating in as well as the thinking you are engaging in. Your own thinking and learning will add to the discussions in the classroom and encourage students to share their own thinking.

Metacognitive questioning

Consider the extent to which your questioning encourages students to think about their thinking, and therefore, learn about learning! Through asking metacognitive questions, you will enable your students to have a better understanding of the learning process, as well as their own self-reflections as learners. Example questions may include:

• Why did you choose to do it that way?
• When you find something tricky, what helps you?
• How do you know when you have really learned something?

‘Adventures of Discovery’

Elena Quagliarello is the senior editor of education for Scholastic News , a current events magazine for students in grades 3–6. She graduated from Rutgers University, where she studied English and earned her master’s degree in elementary education. She is a certified K–12 teacher and previously taught middle school English/language arts for five years:

Critical thinking blasts through the surface level of a topic. It reaches beyond the who and the what and launches students on a learning journey that ultimately unlocks a deeper level of understanding. Teaching students how to think critically helps them turn information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. In the classroom, critical thinking teaches students how to ask and answer the questions needed to read the world. Whether it’s a story, news article, photo, video, advertisement, or another form of media, students can use the following critical-thinking strategies to dig beyond the surface and uncover a wealth of knowledge.

A Layered Learning Approach

Begin by having students read a story, article, or analyze a piece of media. Then have them excavate and explore its various layers of meaning. First, ask students to think about the literal meaning of what they just read. For example, if students read an article about the desegregation of public schools during the 1950s, they should be able to answer questions such as: Who was involved? What happened? Where did it happen? Which details are important? This is the first layer of critical thinking: reading comprehension. Do students understand the passage at its most basic level?

Ask the Tough Questions

The next layer delves deeper and starts to uncover the author’s purpose and craft. Teach students to ask the tough questions: What information is included? What or who is left out? How does word choice influence the reader? What perspective is represented? What values or people are marginalized? These questions force students to critically analyze the choices behind the final product. In today’s age of fast-paced, easily accessible information, it is essential to teach students how to critically examine the information they consume. The goal is to equip students with the mindset to ask these questions on their own.

Strike Gold

The deepest layer of critical thinking comes from having students take a step back to think about the big picture. This level of thinking is no longer focused on the text itself but rather its real-world implications. Students explore questions such as: Why does this matter? What lesson have I learned? How can this lesson be applied to other situations? Students truly engage in critical thinking when they are able to reflect on their thinking and apply their knowledge to a new situation. This step has the power to transform knowledge into wisdom.

Adventures of Discovery

There are vast ways to spark critical thinking in the classroom. Here are a few other ideas:

• Critical Expressionism: In this expanded response to reading from a critical stance, students are encouraged to respond through forms of artistic interpretations, dramatizations, singing, sketching, designing projects, or other multimodal responses. For example, students might read an article and then create a podcast about it or read a story and then act it out.
• Transmediations: This activity requires students to take an article or story and transform it into something new. For example, they might turn a news article into a cartoon or turn a story into a poem. Alternatively, students may rewrite a story by changing some of its elements, such as the setting or time period.
• Words Into Action: In this type of activity, students are encouraged to take action and bring about change. Students might read an article about endangered orangutans and the effects of habitat loss caused by deforestation and be inspired to check the labels on products for palm oil. They might then write a letter asking companies how they make sure the palm oil they use doesn’t hurt rain forests.
• Socratic Seminars: In this student-led discussion strategy, students pose thought-provoking questions to each other about a topic. They listen closely to each other’s comments and think critically about different perspectives.
• Classroom Debates: Aside from sparking a lively conversation, classroom debates naturally embed critical-thinking skills by asking students to formulate and support their own opinions and consider and respond to opposing viewpoints.

Critical thinking has the power to launch students on unforgettable learning experiences while helping them develop new habits of thought, reflection, and inquiry. Developing these skills prepares students to examine issues of power and promote transformative change in the world around them.

‘Quote Analysis’

Dr. Donna Wilson is a psychologist and the author of 20 books, including Developing Growth Mindsets , Teaching Students to Drive Their Brains , and Five Big Ideas for Effective Teaching (2 nd Edition). She is an international speaker who has worked in Asia, the Middle East, Australia, Europe, Jamaica, and throughout the U.S. and Canada. Dr. Wilson can be reached at [email protected] ; visit her website at www.brainsmart.org .

Diane Dahl has been a teacher for 13 years, having taught grades 2-4 throughout her career. Mrs. Dahl currently teaches 3rd and 4th grade GT-ELAR/SS in Lovejoy ISD in Fairview, Texas. Follow her on Twitter at @DahlD, and visit her website at www.fortheloveofteaching.net :

A growing body of research over the past several decades indicates that teaching students how to be better thinkers is a great way to support them to be more successful at school and beyond. In the book, Teaching Students to Drive Their Brains , Dr. Wilson shares research and many motivational strategies, activities, and lesson ideas that assist students to think at higher levels. Five key strategies from the book are as follows:

• Facilitate conversation about why it is important to think critically at school and in other contexts of life. Ideally, every student will have a contribution to make to the discussion over time.
• Begin teaching thinking skills early in the school year and as a daily part of class.
• As this instruction begins, introduce students to the concept of brain plasticity and how their brilliant brains change during thinking and learning. This can be highly motivational for students who do not yet believe they are good thinkers!
• Explicitly teach students how to use the thinking skills.
• Facilitate student understanding of how the thinking skills they are learning relate to their lives at school and in other contexts.

Below are two lessons that support critical thinking, which can be defined as the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.

Mrs. Dahl prepares her 3rd and 4th grade classes for a year of critical thinking using quote analysis .

During Native American studies, her 4 th grade analyzes a Tuscarora quote: “Man has responsibility, not power.” Since students already know how the Native Americans’ land had been stolen, it doesn’t take much for them to make the logical leaps. Critical-thought prompts take their thinking even deeper, especially at the beginning of the year when many need scaffolding. Some prompts include:

• … from the point of view of the Native Americans?
• … from the point of view of the settlers?
• How do you think your life might change over time as a result?
• Can you relate this quote to anything else in history?

Analyzing a topic from occupational points of view is an incredibly powerful critical-thinking tool. After learning about the Mexican-American War, Mrs. Dahl’s students worked in groups to choose an occupation with which to analyze the war. The chosen occupations were: anthropologist, mathematician, historian, archaeologist, cartographer, and economist. Then each individual within each group chose a different critical-thinking skill to focus on. Finally, they worked together to decide how their occupation would view the war using each skill.

For example, here is what each student in the economist group wrote:

• When U.S.A. invaded Mexico for land and won, Mexico ended up losing income from the settlements of Jose de Escandon. The U.S.A. thought that they were gaining possible tradable land, while Mexico thought that they were losing precious land and resources.
• Whenever Texas joined the states, their GDP skyrocketed. Then they went to war and spent money on supplies. When the war was resolving, Texas sold some of their land to New Mexico for $10 million. This allowed Texas to pay off their debt to the U.S., improving their relationship.
• A detail that converged into the Mexican-American War was that Mexico and the U.S. disagreed on the Texas border. With the resulting treaty, Texas ended up gaining more land and economic resources.
• Texas gained land from Mexico since both countries disagreed on borders. Texas sold land to New Mexico, which made Texas more economically structured and allowed them to pay off their debt.

This was the first time that students had ever used the occupations technique. Mrs. Dahl was astonished at how many times the kids used these critical skills in other areas moving forward.

Thanks to Dr. Auwal, Elena, Dr. Wilson, and Diane for their contributions!

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

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