Curiosity – Necessary Whispers

Poem: Stillness and Wind

“You can observe a lot
just by watching,”
said a baseball player
who understood seasons.

Two afternoons ago,
I sat in a lecture hall
watching a man
who still loves what he does.

This, I think, is a form of generosity.

He spoke about observation
as though it were not a skill
but a posture,
something you lean into
rather than master.

Take the dandelion.

We learned its name early.
We learned it could grant wishes
if we breathed hard enough.
We learned the wind would do the rest.

Then we decided
we knew it.

Label applied.
Lesson complete.
Attention withdrawn.

The dandelion continued anyway
with its architecture,
its patience,
its quiet mathematics of return.

It kept unfolding relationships
with bees,
with soil,
with children who forgot its name
but still loved its defiance.

How many things
have we learned only enough
to stop looking?

How many people
do we greet by name
while knowing nothing
of their design?

Later, we were encouraged
to ask our questions
and then to set them down.

To watch.

Intellectual beauty likes to be solved.
Aesthetic beauty prefers to be witnessed.

One explains.
The other arrives.

So perhaps today
we step outside
without extracting meaning.

No schedules.
No proof.

Just a willingness
to stand still
long enough
for something ordinary
to show itself
as extraordinary.

And if we feel something
we cannot name,
let us resist the urge
to name it.

Let us watch.

© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025

Thinking in Community: Constructivism and the Socratic Tradition in Higher Education

By Jill Szoo Wilson

In contemporary higher education, a surprising harmony emerges between two pedagogical lineages often perceived as distinct: constructivist teaching philosophy and the Socratic Method. One grounds itself in cognitive development and social learning theory; the other traces its heritage to ancient Greece. Yet together, they form one of the most intellectually generative combinations available to the modern classroom. Both treat learning not as passive absorption but as active inquiry. Both assume that students arrive with prior knowledge, internal frameworks, and tacit assumptions that shape how they understand new information. Most importantly, both contend that education is not simply the transfer of content, but the transformation of the learner.

Constructivist thinkers argue that students build knowledge rather than receive it. Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist, described this process as a dynamic interplay between assimilation and accommodation, a continual restructuring of cognitive architecture as learners encounter new experiences (The Origins of Intelligence in Children). Lev Vygotsky, the Russian social psychologist, extended this idea by emphasizing the social dimensions of learning. His concept of the Zone of Proximal Development proposed that understanding flourishes when learners engage in dialogue with a more capable peer or mentor. John Dewey, the American philosopher of education, echoed this view, asserting that “knowledge is not something which exists apart from experience” (Democracy and Education). Their scholarship provides the intellectual foundation for constructivist pedagogy: students learn by doing, by reflecting, and by negotiating meaning in community.

The Socratic Method shares this commitment to meaning-making through dialogue. Though separated by millennia from contemporary cognitive theory, Socrates, the Athenian philosopher, had already intuited that learning requires active mental engagement. His method—probing questions, conceptual clarification, and disciplined reasoning—invites students to articulate, examine, and ultimately revise their assumptions. Mortimer Adler, the American educational philosopher, writes in The Paideia Proposal that the Socratic classroom is defined by its refusal to reduce ideas to mere facts. Instead, it seeks to refine the mind through inquiry. Similarly, Nel Noddings, the influential scholar of ethics and education, observed that Socratic questioning “challenges students to consider why they believe what they believe” and requires an educator to listen closely, ask precisely, and build questions that reveal the architecture of a student’s thinking (Educating Moral People).

Although constructivism and the Socratic Method arise from different intellectual traditions, their meeting point is the conviction that learning is constructed, not delivered. When paired, they generate a classroom that is both rigorous and learner-centered.

Constructivism in Practice: Learning as a Process of Meaning-Making

Constructivist pedagogy begins with a simple premise: students bring a world with them. Prior experiences, cultural narratives, internalized scripts, emotional histories, and unspoken values become part of the classroom’s cognitive landscape. Jerome Bruner, a central figure in cognitive constructivism, argued that learning occurs when students “go beyond the information given” (The Process of Education). He believed that education should not simply prepare students for future life; it should cultivate their ability to interpret and re-interpret their world.

This orientation toward interpretation requires instructors to move from transmission to facilitation. In a transmission model, the teacher is positioned as the primary source of knowledge who delivers information for students to receive, record, and reproduce. In a facilitative model, the teacher instead designs learning experiences, poses questions, and structures interactions through which students actively construct understanding for themselves. Jerome Bruner, the American cognitive psychologist, argued that learning occurs most powerfully when students are guided to “go beyond the information given,” a process that requires thoughtful scaffolding and inquiry-based engagement (The Process of Education). Stephen Brookfield, a leading scholar in adult learning, similarly contends that facilitation encourages learners to examine their assumptions, engage in reflection, and build insight through structured dialogue (Teaching for Critical Thinking).

These theorists converge on one central claim: meaning is co-constructed. Students learn not only from lectures and readings, but from the interplay of questions, reflections, and interpretive tensions that arise during discussion.

In the college classroom, this creates a pedagogical environment that values nuance over finality. Students learn to test ideas, articulate interpretations, and reconsider or solidify earlier conclusions. The instructor becomes an architect of inquiry, designing learning experiences to provoke reflection rather than prescribing answers. Constructivism thus offers the philosophical soil in which Socratic teaching can take root.

Socratic Questioning: Inquiry as Intellectual Discipline

If constructivism provides the philosophical ground, the Socratic Method supplies the structure. Socratic pedagogy is not spontaneous conversation; it is purposeful inquiry. Christopher Phillips, founder of the modern Socrates Café movement, describes Socratic questioning as “a shared search for understanding” where each question functions as both challenge and invitation (Socrates Café). Allan Bloom characterizes this process as the cultivation of the “examined life,” where intellectual discomfort is not an obstacle but an essential component of learning (The Closing of the American Mind).

At its core, the Socratic Method rests on three types of inquiry:

Clarification questions, which refine imprecise statements.
Assumption questions, which uncover the beliefs beneath a claim.
Implication questions, which reveal the consequences of those beliefs.

Together, they encourage students to build a more precise conceptual vocabulary. This practice strengthens not only critical thinking but also metacognition, the process by which learners examine their own thinking and monitor how understanding develops. By articulating how they know what they know, students begin to understand the architecture of their own reasoning.

Stephen Brookfield notes that Socratic inquiry helps students identify “assumptions that are taken for granted and rarely examined” (Teaching for Critical Thinking). These moments of self-interrogation are often destabilizing, yet profoundly generative. The student shifts from absorbing knowledge to inhabiting it.

Within the college classroom, the Socratic Method functions as both compass and catalyst. It directs students toward deeper understanding and accelerates the cognitive processes described by constructivist theorists. It requires students to participate actively in their own intellectual development.

Where the Traditions Converge: Dialogue as Pedagogical Architecture

Constructivism and the Socratic Method converge in their shared conviction that learning emerges through intentional interaction. Both approaches resist the notion that knowledge is acquired through answers alone; instead, they emphasize the intellectual labor of forming, testing, and refining those answers. Dialogue becomes the medium through which understanding is shaped, not merely communicated.

In a constructivist–Socratic classroom, dialogue serves as an architectural framework that supports and directs cognitive growth. Questions are not interruptions to learning but the mechanisms that move it forward. They guide students from initial uncertainty toward increasingly complex interpretations, prompting them to articulate assumptions, revisit earlier conclusions, and trace the logic of their own thinking. It is in this movement that Vygotsky’s insight becomes visible: learning accelerates in the space between what a student can already do and what becomes possible through carefully guided interaction. The Zone of Proximal Development is not a chart or a formula in this setting. It is the lived moment when a question arrives at just the right level of difficulty, when a peer’s interpretation stretches a student’s own, when the instructor’s prompt nudges thought into a new configuration. As students respond to questions situated just beyond their current mastery, they test hypotheses, negotiate meaning with peers, and begin to inhabit the intellectual habits of inquiry.

Such a classroom is relational, reflective, and rigorously engaged. It honors the individuality of student experience while drawing learners into a shared pursuit of understanding. Within this environment, the instructor becomes a designer of intellectual movement and a structurer of dialogue so that students can recognize themselves as co-authors of their learning. The result is not merely the acquisition of knowledge but the cultivation of an interpretive stance that endures far beyond the course’s boundaries.

Conclusion

As these traditions come together in practice, the college classroom becomes a setting where inquiry deepens and understanding gains structure. Their shared commitment to reflection and the active construction of meaning encourages students to interpret ideas with increasing precision and to recognize the habits of thought that guide interpretation itself. Through this integrated approach, dialogue emerges as a sustained intellectual practice, inviting students into the slow, disciplined work of questioning, analyzing, and revising their thinking.

This work reaches far beyond the mastery of course content. The interpretive habits cultivated in a constructivist and Socratic classroom form the foundation for adult intellectual life. They strengthen the ability to discern patterns, evaluate competing claims, and approach complexity with patience rather than haste. In a culture shaped by constant information and rapid exchange, these habits create a practice of attentiveness. They help students recognize nuance, situate themselves within ongoing conversations, and contribute thoughtfully to the civic, professional, and relational worlds they will inhabit.

Viewed in this light, the purpose of higher education expands beyond the acquisition of knowledge. It becomes an invitation to develop a way of thinking characterized by curiosity, rigor, and a readiness to dwell in questions. When instructors adopt a pedagogy that affirms the social construction of understanding and the disciplined inquiry associated with the Socratic tradition, they help students cultivate a lifelong interpretive stance. This stance, more than any discrete skill or body of information, equips learners to encounter a complex world with insight, discernment, and intellectual courage

Living With Questions: The Socratic Method in Classroom and Culture

By Jill Szoo Wilson

Socrates left a legacy without pages or diagrams. No book, no formal lectures, no chalkboard sketches survive him. What endures is the way he lived with others: asking questions, listening intently, and then pressing further. His gift is a method of dialogue that unsettles, clarifies, and invites. To teach in the Socratic tradition is to resist performance and cultivate a climate where inquiry carries more authority than certainty.

That tradition speaks as directly to the classroom as it does to a fractured culture. In both settings, the Socratic method interrupts the rush to easy answers. It honors the long pause. It elevates the well-placed question above the polished explanation. What begins as a teaching practice matures into a posture for living, one that dignifies thought and relationship by daring to stay with questions.

The Marketplace Origins: Asking Instead of Telling

Athens in Socrates’ lifetime was a city at once confident and restless. Fresh from its victories over Persia, it stood as the cultural beacon of Greece. Marble temples gleamed on the Acropolis, dramatists filled the theatres with tragedies and comedies, and statesmen praised the promise of democracy. Yet beneath this brilliance ran deep fissures—political rivalries, the scars of war, and a constant struggle over who truly held power.

The agora, Athens’ central marketplace, embodied this tension. It was a place of commerce and spectacle: stalls piled with figs and olives, artisans hammering bronze, and heralds shouting the news of decrees and battles. Philosophers debated beside fishmongers; politicians addressed citizens over the clamor of bargaining; incense smoke mingled with the smell of fresh bread and animals waiting for sacrifice. It was here, amid noise and distraction, that Socrates carved out his peculiar space.

He would stop citizens in their errands and ask them to define justice, courage, or piety, slowly unraveling their answers until their certainties frayed. In Euthyphro, he presses a man outside the courthouse to explain piety, only to show that each attempt contradicts the last. In Laches, he asks two generals to define courage, and their confident replies dissolve into confusion. In the opening of Republic, he challenges Cephalus and Polemarchus on the meaning of justice, demonstrating how easily their definitions falter under questioning. What seemed like simple conversation became a mirror, exposing how fragile even the most assured convictions were. Plato’s dialogues preserve these encounters not as tidy resolutions but as open-ended confrontations with truth.

What set Socrates apart was not the possession of wisdom but the way he pursued it. He treated each encounter as a mutual investigation, overturning the idea that knowledge could be handed down like a finished object. Truth, for him, was something coaxed into view through dialogue, through the disciplined art of asking.

Socrates’ conversations in the marketplace did more than unsettle individuals; they modeled a form of learning that has echoed across centuries. What began among merchants and magistrates in Athens set the pattern for dialogue wherever teaching takes place. The classroom, no less than the agora, can become a site where questions break open assumptions and where truth takes shape in conversation.

The Classroom as Dialogue

In a modern classroom, the Socratic method unfolds in deceptively simple ways. A student offers an answer. Rather than affirm or correct, the teacher presses: Why? What evidence supports that? Could it be otherwise? The questions circle, sometimes frustratingly, until the student is forced to examine not only the conclusion but the reasoning beneath it.

Educational research helps explain why this works. In a classic study published in Cognitive Science, Michelene Chi and her colleagues found that students who were prompted to generate their own explanations remembered concepts more deeply and transferred their knowledge more effectively than those who were simply told the answer (Chi, de Leeuw, Chiu, & LaVancher, 1994). The act of reasoning aloud forces the mind to weave fragments of knowledge into coherence. In other words, the question matters more than the answer.

The Socratic method also relies on what psychologists call productive struggle. Manu Kapur, writing in Cognition and Instruction in 2008, demonstrated that students who wrestled with challenging problems, even to the point of initial failure, ultimately achieved more robust learning than those given immediate instruction. The discomfort of not knowing is not a flaw in the process. It is the process. A teacher’s role is not to step in too quickly, but to sustain that tension just long enough for students to find their own foothold.

Silence, too, is part of the method. Mary Budd Rowe’s pioneering research on “wait time” in the 1970s revealed that when teachers extended their pause after asking a question from one second to three or more, students’ answers became longer, more thoughtful, and more complex. What can feel like an empty pause to the teacher becomes essential space for the student, a place where thought can ripen. The Socratic method depends on this kind of patience.

This approach does not abandon structure. It requires precision. The teacher must listen closely, know when to push further, and know when to let silence do the work. In this sense, Socratic teaching is less about performance and more about orchestration. It is the art of drawing forth what already exists in the room.

One can think of it as choreography. Students move between certainty and doubt, between answer and reconsideration. The teacher’s role is not to correct their steps but to keep them dancing.

Everyday Questions: Beyond the Classroom

The Socratic method is not confined to philosophy seminars or literature courses. Its spirit belongs equally to the conversations of daily life. In relationships, questions can transform conflict into dialogue. A child says to a parent, “You never listen to me.” The reflexive answer is defensive. The Socratic one is curious: What do you mean when you say I don’t listen? Can you give me an example?

This instinct to probe rather than defend rests on something deeper than style; it rests on the nature of curiosity itself. Psychologists remind us that curiosity is more than idle wondering. George Loewenstein, in a landmark 1994 article in Psychological Bulletin, described curiosity as an “information gap,” the restless tension that arises when we sense something missing in our understanding. More recent work in Frontiers in Psychology shows that when students encounter uncertainty, curiosity becomes the force that drives them to explore and make new connections (Vogl, Pekrun, Murayama, and Loderer, 2020).

In friendships, in workplaces, even in disagreements over politics or faith, asking rather than asserting changes the emotional temperature. A statement closes the door. A question cracks it open. Curiosity reveals something essential about imagination: how a person envisions not only what is, but what could be; the possibilities they long to explore, the connections they hope to forge with themselves, with others, and with the world.

Neuroscience reinforces this. Celeste Kidd and Benjamin Hayden, writing in Neuron in 2015, define curiosity as “the motivation to seek information for its own sake.” In a related study, Matthias Gruber and colleagues demonstrated that curiosity activates the brain’s reward circuits and strengthens memory formation (Neuron, 2014). A good question, then, does more than elicit an answer. It calls imagination into play, deepens memory, and builds connection.

This does not mean questions are neutral. They can unsettle. They can demand honesty. Yet precisely because they do not declare, they invite the other person into the act of discovery. Socratic questioning is not about winning an argument. It is about honoring another’s mind enough to linger with them in uncertainty and to treat their imagination and hopes as worthy of exploration.

The Risks of Unsettling: A Real Life Example

To live by questions is to embrace vulnerability. Students often resist when pressed beyond their first answers. They want the comfort of being told they are correct. Adults, too, may bristle when asked to explain themselves. The Socratic method exposes the fragility of our assumptions, and this exposure can feel threatening.

On the first day of one of my Theatre classes this semester, I asked my students, “What is art?” I called on each of them to give me a definition and wrote down the key words from their responses: skill, technique, motivation to create, free speech, passion, purpose, beauty, subjectivity, therapy, communication, no rules, and evolving.

We then took each word and examined it together. “Beauty,” I asked, “is beauty art? Is art beauty?” One student pushed back: “Well, art can be beautiful, but it can also be scary. Or ugly. Or even neutral, depending on who’s looking at it. So, no. Beauty is not art.” I pressed further: “Can we agree that beauty is a descriptor of some art? Maybe we could even say all beauty points to an artist?” Another student jumped in: “Not really. A tree is beautiful. Clouds are beautiful. They appear from natural processes. So they aren’t art.” I redirected, “Can we agree that beauty is a function of art?” And on the conversation went until the students decided to cross beauty off the list.

One by one, we worked through each of the words on the list in the same way, weighing assumptions, testing counterexamples, and listening carefully to each other’s reasoning. By the end, the only words left on the board were creation, purpose, and expression. Together, we concluded that art is “creative expression on purpose.” The definition wasn’t handed down. It was discovered.

Moments like these illustrate both the risk and the reward of the Socratic method. Students feel unsettled at first, stripped of the security of a quick, “right” answer. However, the unease compels them to move past preconceived notions and into genuine thought. Jack Mezirow, in his work on transformative learning, called these moments “disorienting dilemmas,” disruptions that compel us to reconsider our frames of reference (Mezirow, 1991). Similarly, research on “desirable difficulties” in learning shows that challenges that slow down the process often produce stronger retention and deeper understanding (Bjork & Bjork, 2011).

Teachers who practice this method must learn patience. Silence stretches. Frustration mounts. The temptation to resolve the tension with a quick answer is strong. But to yield too soon is to miss the point. Socratic dialogue insists that truth is not a prize handed down but a path walked together.

These moments of questioning can be charged, uncomfortable, and revealing. They carry the risk of resistance, but they also create the conditions for genuine transformation. To teach Socratically is to accept that unease is not failure. It is the very ground where change takes root.

The Gift of Dialogue

The gift of the Socratic method lies in its redefinition of authority. The teacher’s power is not in providing answers but in dignifying students with the capacity to seek their own. To be asked a serious question is to be taken seriously. It signals that one’s perspective matters, that one’s reasoning deserves attention.

This gift matters far beyond the classroom. The United States is in a season of turmoil. Every time an angry word is shouted, a bullet flies through the air, or a cultural symbol is weaponized, dialogue fractures into generalizations, name-calling, and heels dug into the soil where the blood of ancestors who fought in the Civil War still lingers. When dialogue collapses, we don’t only lose civility. We lose the possibility of understanding.

One afternoon, I set aside my lecture notes and simply asked my class, “How are you all? If there was one thing you would want my generation to understand about your generation, what would it be?” The room quieted. Students looked at each other, then at me, and began to speak. Their answers were not rehearsed. They spilled out of anxiety, depression, numbness, confusion, and a sense of chaos. And yet, as they named these things, the fire burning in the world outside our classroom seemed to recede. No one was trading positions or slogans. We were speaking above them. Each person had the opportunity to share complex thoughts, emotions, and ideas, while others listened.

All I did was ask a question and then pay attention.

Conclusion: Living With Questions

The Socratic method is more than a teaching strategy. It is a way of being present to the world with curiosity. It slows the rush toward certainty and leaves room for ambiguity while honoring the dignity of another person’s thought.

To live by questions is not easy. It asks for patience, humility, and a willingness to stay with silence. Yet in that space, understanding becomes possible. Dialogue deepens. Connections form. Perhaps this is why the method endures. Not because it guarantees answers, but because it keeps us searching, together.

Tag: Curiosity