Puzzling,and puzzling about puzzle development

Abstract

This paper has two roles in this collection. First, it illustrates Exploratory Practice (EP) in action, with two classroom investigations. Secondly, it goes further, and throws light on the key mechanism of EP (see Allwright, this issue, Sections III.1(d) and IV.2) - puzzlement. It thus presents two different puzzling processes, the EP process as set out in the introductory paper to this issue, and a meta-process of puzzling about our own puzzlement processes. First, we carried out separate research studies as EP practitioners, with one of us investigating the puzzle, ‘does the dictionary really help our students to understand the text?’, and the other investigating the puzzle, ‘why do my students translate words even when they’ve already understood their meanings in English?’ Then we puzzled about the process of puzzle development itself. This further investigation contributed, we believe, to a better understanding about how intra and inter puzzlement processes can be integrated. Our emerging understandings led us to suggest that we mentally operate in a puzzlement zone while working with our puzzles. Drawing on a possible parallel with Vygotsky’s (1984) notion of ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) and on the ZPD’s levels of development (actual development level and level of potential development), we hypothesize that we mentally act at similar levels - the actual understanding level and the level of potential understanding - while working with our puzzles in this puzzlement zone.

We present our work together as one way of incorporating EP into research at Master’s level.

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