That was the question posed to students at Marquette University in Milwaukee last fall who were being recruited for Introduction to Inquiry, a new seminar for first-year students. It was created to enhance their awareness of their learning habits and to introduce them to the habits of questioning so critical to college life.

Members of the faculty advising committee who were planning the seminar knew what they wanted first-year students to be able to do read carefully, communicate effectively, listen well, organize and support an argument, and use the advising process to make sound academic choices. Introduction to Inquiry, in its weekly, 75-minute sessions, addresses these needs squarely.

In so doing it differs dramatically from traditional freshman seminar courses because it focuses completely on the student as learner and not on the teacher as teacher.

Each meeting of faculty leader and ten students spends some time on learning study and test-taking skills, discovering campus resources, and discussing academic honesty, personal relationships, and other issues students confront.

But most of the time is devoted to discussing a reading, using a question posed by the faculty leader as a starting point The discussion follows the rules of shared inquiry, a method made familiar by the Great Books Foundation. Its requirements are four: that no one participate who has not completed the reading, that the discussion focus only on the text, that opinions be backed up with evidence from the text, and that leaders only ask questions, never answer them.

This approach can come as a shock to students. Rather than telling them how to study, the seminar uses the classroom as a lab where they perfect needed skills. Along the way, they explore the art of asking questions -- about literature and politics as well as about personal experiences and choices. What could be more essential?

The seminar had its genesis in August 1993, when associate professor of history John Krugler became associate dean responsible for academic advising. For him, advising was more than mere course selection and paperwork, he wanted to make it more relevant to undergraduate education. His response to the question "What do we want advising to do for our students?" was straightforward: to develop their ability to make sound academic and personal decisions in collaboration with a faculty mentor.

Many of his colleagues felt the same way; they wanted an approach that would bring student and adviser together regularly, allowing an effective relationship to develop. One such colleague was John Pustejovsky, associate professor of German. He had been volunteering since 1990 in a Junior Great Books program in his children's elementary school. When leading discussions of stories such as "The Emperor's New Clothes" with fourth graders, he learned to ask questions he genuinely wondered about, "real" questions, not the "teacher" questions he had come to rely on.

Pustejovsky began using the shared inquiry method in his German literature courses and found that it gave students -- fourth graders and college students alike -- permission to work together to answer an interesting question. Two years of informal weekly discussions had convinced him that students enjoyed the interaction and also learned to read for detail and meaning, to listen, and to argue effectively.

Krugler, Pustejovsky, and others on the faculty advising committee quickly grasped the appeal of combining shared inquiry and academic advising. In January 1994 they began to lay the foundations for the course, which was implemented the following August.

Buoyed by the enthusiasm of students and faculty in the pilot program and by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the seminar is now in its second year. The fifteen faculty colleagues leading the seminars take nearly 60 hours of training in shared inquiry and advising practices. This training is crucial because those four rules of shared inquiry, while simple, can be hard to follow, especially for academics, whose enthusiasm for their own ideas has been known to overshadow at times their ability to listen effectively.

Listen they must, not only because they may only ask questions but also because the students are responsible for learning to construct an answer to the question posed. And while students are learning to read and argue, leaders are learning to ask probing questions and to' listen patiently as answers develop.

The leader's question is the starting point for each discussion, although the "right" question can sometimes be difficult to find. It must meet three criteria: it must be answerable using the text, it must have more than one reasonable answer, and 'it must express the leader's own wonder about the story. Shared inquiry can be used with a variety of texts -- the creation story in Genesis, or Langston Hughes's short story, "Thank you, M'am," or Max Frankel's opinion piece in the New York Times, "The War and the Law" -- as long as they are substantive and can bear probing questioning.

Consider what could be done with The Grapes of Wrath. A leader who asked an analytical question such as "Why are the Joads moving to California'?" would find it difficult to evoke stimulating conversation after eliciting the straight-forward response "Because they lost their farm in Oklahoma." There's really nothing that could be added to that answer. On the other hand, an interpretive question such as "Were the Joads responsible for being evicted by their landlord?" could lead to a lively discussion and a variety of valid answers. One student's response such as "Yes. They couldn't adapt to agricultural changes such as the use of the tractor" could be complemented by another's "No. The eviction was due to economic circumstances beyond their control." Part of the fun of shared inquiry is watching students discover the variety of answers that a good question can generate.

Students learn that there are different types of questions, each calling for a different strategy to answer it, and they use this skill in other courses. "In my international politics class," recalls student Matt Kuhse, "I was able to determine what was an interpretive question and what was an analytical question and was able to answer accordingly."

Before long, discussions are driven by students' interpretive questions, which become a collaborative enterprise for the group. "One time," says student Leah Egan, "we wrote a whole board full of questions. We came up with questions that we as a group wanted to answer. It put us in the driver's seat of the discussion. That was very empowering. " What better way to show new students that scholarly inquiry begins with a real question that a real person wants answered?

The true measure of the course's success is how it enhances students' first-year experiences, and their enthusiasm for discussion is inspiring. Shared inquiry makes the classroom more than just a delivery site for course material. It becomes a level playing field as the faculty leader solicits insights that are then probed and validated by students' peers, it becomes a place for experimenting with ideas and testing new abilities in a constructive atmosphere.

Because the seminar's objective is to develop in students the skills and habits of productive learners, there are no tests or papers. The adviser pays close attention to students' work, particularly their interaction in discussions, to gauge progress.

During fourth-week conferences, adviser and student reflect on the student's work in the seminar and other courses as well as his or her adjustment to college. It is in these one-on-one conferences that students may find themselves for the first time asked to reflect critically on their academic performance and not simply to label it with a letter grade.

And this carries over into the other facet of this program: academic advising. In the seminar, students adapt to being asked for sound reasoning. So during advising conferences, seminar students are not surprised when their advisers pose tough questions about their academic choices and development and expect cogent answers. Each student develops a unique relationship with his or her adviser because the course demands a model of dialogue different from the "expert-talk" model that can drive lectures and advising As a result, advising becomes more than just getting students to take advice. It is teaching, and Introduction to Inquiry identifies both teacher and adviser 'In the person who constantly asks thoughtful questions Students came to recognize that the seminar experience was very different from just seeing their advisers every week.

Twenty-five faculty members have now committed themselves to the training the course involves for reasons as simple as those four rules: they find Introduction to Inquiry a 'genuinely stimulating intellectual experience. As teachers, they recognize something very familiar in shared inquiry "That is the way I teach," most say initially. But the discipline the rules require is a sobering reminder of how easy it Is to shift the equilibrium of classroom conversation. "I didn't realize how opinionated I was," says Carolyn Wells, professor of social work. "What I did find difficult and challenging was remaining in the questioning role."

The rule that leaders may only ask, not answer, questions spurs many to creative approaches to academic advising. Associate professor of theology Julian Hills asks his students to come to registration-advising conferences prepared to answer two questions: "What skills do you expect will be required in the courses you have chosen for spring semester?" and "How do you expect to use what you have learned this semester?" He shared this technique with other leaders at a biweekly meeting, and many eagerly adopted it. What was exciting about the leaders' group was that they learned from each other.

The course allows a modeling of the difficult balance of skeptical attentiveness, argumentativeness, intellectual curiosity, and simple wonder that characterizes academic life. It permits faculty to cultivate in students what they value most: reading and listening carefully, speaking precisely, and organizing and supporting an argument. Moreover, the rules of discussion are analogous to the "rules" governing scholarly enterprise -- inquiry by a community of learners, argumentation supported by evidence, questions of concern to the whole community, precision in expressing results, submitting to the judgment of one's peers, and civilized disagreement.

This process exemplifies the purposes of Jesuit education. It declares our confidence in the study of texts as a source of insights into timeless problems; it rewards argumentation and consensus as a model for problem solving; it affirms others' experience as a guide for our own; and it provides continual attentiveness to the learner in the classroom and in the meetings of adviser and student.

This project has given us a way to make plain our fundamental trust in words. And without such a trust, what point is there in seeking truth?