Gordon Wells
I am currently a Professor of Education at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Until July 2000, I was a Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. While in Toronto, I was an active member of DICEP; now I am a long-distance member.
Prior to moving to Canada in 1984, I was Director of the longitudinal study of language development, "Language at Home at School", at the University of Bristol, England. In that study, we followed a representative sample of children from age 1 to age 10, recording naturally-occurring samples of interaction at home and at school. This study convinced me that, in addition to an innate predisposition to learn language, children need a rich and varied experience of conversation with others in order to learn how meaning is made and experience construed in the language of their own particular community. In principle, I believe the same holds for learning in school, although guidance and instruction that is both more systematic and more explicit is needed to help children master the registers and genres of written language in which meaning is made in the academic disciplines.
While in Toronto, I extended these interests in a series of collaborative action research projects with teachers and university colleagues, in which our general aim was to increase understanding of the roles that different modes of discourse can potentially play in learning and teaching in different curricular areas. This we did by creating and progressively improving a variety of inquiry-based activity settings and observing, recording and analyzing the opportunities they provided for collaborative knowledge building, through action and reflection, using a variety of semiotic tools for communication and representation. As is indicated by the title of our research, "Developing Inquiring Communities in Education Project" (funded by the Spencer Foundation), we came to see the idea of the "community of inquiry" as of central importance, both in the classroom and in the faculty lounge, and in universities as well as in schools. In the various phases of the research, we attempted to make connections between these different communities and at the same time made these attempts a further topic for investigation.
Underpinning this work, I have a strong interest in sociocultural theory, as this is being developed on the basis of the seminal ideas of Vygotsky; also in social semiotics, literacy, and the analysis of discourse. These are the areas in which my doctoral level teaching is focused, and in which I do most of my reading and writing (see list of publications). I am also an enthusiastic user of email: to keep up to date through participation in several internet lists (xmca,xtar), and as an essential component of the classroom community that I try to create in each of the courses that I teach.
In the rest of my life, I enjoy spending holidays in Europe and visiting my family - particularly my grandchildren - in England. I like classical music, particularly chamber music and opera, and play the flute (when I have time). For bedtime reading, I enjoy historical novels.
Email: gwells@cats.ucsc.edu