Question
Welcome to your Question block. In the next few weeks, you will draw a blueprint for the rest of your Quest education. This may be exhilarating: having completed (or come close to completing) the requirements imposed upon you by the Foundation Plan, you are now at liberty to design your own education. This may also be nerve-wracking: you must decide what interests you, what you want to know, and what you want to do. It will be up to you, with the guidance of a faculty mentor, to chart a course through the next two years that will take you to Keystone Block, graduation from Quest, and the world beyond.
The Question Block is designed to help you through this. It is not a course where we teach you things; it is a structured process in which we help you cultivate the skills and habits you will need to take charge of your own learning.
This process moves through three broad phases:
First, you must articulate a question. This is harder than it sounds. What interests you? What do you want to know more about? What change do you want to see, or make, in the world? What puzzles have you come across in the last two years? Why does this interest you? You have come into this class with a beginning – a précis – but you should expect this initial articulation of your question to evolve over the course of the block.
Second, you must situate this question within broad fields of human knowledge. This will be an exercise in defining and refining the question itself; it will also require you to start thinking about academic disciplines as tools for knowing about the world. Be- coming an interdisciplinary learner means being able to orient yourself in relation to disciplines without becoming confined within them!
Third and finally, you will develop a plan for exploring your Question. This will become a roadmap for your third and fourth years at Quest: What courses will you take? What will your experiential learning project be? What major texts will ground and inspire your thinking?
The Question Block is a time for reflection. It doesn’t seem like there’s very much to do, and there won’t even be class on most days. Don’t be fooled! To paraphrase Clausewitz, in Question Block, everything is very simple… but that does not mean that it is easy.
Department: Interdisciplinary
University: Quest University Canada
Years offered: 2018-2019