Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: “Testing procedure and technique, P.S. 19.” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections. How can we ask our students questions about the past that begin to reveal the motives of historical actors, address the interplay of structure and agency, and investigate the collision of long-run continuities and sudden contingencies? Over the last two years Nicholas Kryczka, Whitney E. Barringer, and Scot McFarlane have been talking to hundreds of history teachers across the United States about their practices of historical questioning as part of the AHA’s Mapping the Landscape of Secondary History Education project. In this essay for the #AHRSyllabus project, they trace curricular initiatives around “inquiry” from the late nineteenth century to the present moment to suggest a set of best practices for today’s classroom that can, in their words, allow “students to see what history can do for them, and what they must do for themselves.” As a three-person research team studying the current state of US history curriculum in American middle schools and high schools, we have spent the better part of two years with social studies teachers, administrators, and their materials. We spent hundreds of hours interviewing teachers and administrators and collected thousands of responses from a national survey of middle and high school US history teachers. We reviewed textbooks, lesson plans, curriculum maps, PowerPoints, essay rubrics, document packets, and links upon links of resources. Across this vast archive, certain keywords surfaced, and among these, “inquiry” took something like a leading role. Wherever we looked, the official voices of the field emphasized the notion of social studies as an interdisciplinary, investigative procedure, grounded in the close reading of primary documents and motivated by the posing of “essential” or “compelling” questions. For many history teachers working in the twenty-first century, inquiry is the air they breathe. Whether they imagine a history class as a reenactment of the historical method in miniature, as a training ground for some set of transferable dispositions and habits of mind, or simply as an opportunity to cultivate a sense of sustained curiosity among their students, teachers structure their courses around key questions to be pursued by some sequence of inquiry modules. Direct instruction by way of lecture, textbooks, and documentary film hasn’t disappeared, but these excursions are often portrayed as the bare minimum of context necessary to dive into the allegedly more immersive and challenging stuff of inquiry. Cover of The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards: Guidance for Enhancing the Rigor of K-12 Civics, Economics, Geography, and History. Courtesy of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). In the many interviews we conducted, teachers justified a focus on inquiry because of its connection to “student-centered” learning.1 Many teachers appreciate that inquiry gives students extra space to think, encourages them to generate their own questions, and allows them to “look at what they’re interested in,” leading to further student buy-in.2 Teachers sense a natural fit between history and inquiry, whether in the specific tasks of daily classwork, like analyzing primary sources and writing an effective research paper, or in terms of developing broader mental temperaments, like thinking “more about complexity.”3 Even as many teachers welcome a focus on inquiry, we noticed the special role it plays for administrators of state and local education agencies. For curriculum specialists and instructional coordinators, inquiry is one among many managerial watchwords they believe they must “align” their teachers toward. Professional networks put the concept at the center of their descriptions of best practices, and social studies standards in multiple states now echo the National Council for the Social Studies’ College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework in centering inquiry as both process and goal.4 Administrators who often feel obliged to stress the urgency and innovation associated with an initiative, emphasize inquiry as a source of change rather than a familiar practice—an approach that doesn’t necessarily win teachers over. In interviews, teachers expressed a hazy sense of whether inquiry was new or not; some felt that they had been “doing inquiry without realizing” it throughout their careers, or that maybe recent changes in guidance from administrators were “just the jargon.”5 Even as some admins we interviewed said they had “not heard a single teacher say that they’ve been disappointed with inquiry,” others noted the challenges of getting buy-in from their teachers.6 Directives to find inquiry-focused resources can leave teachers overwhelmed. Promoting inquiry as novelty also empowers administrators to attach other initiatives to its implementation; fusing “inclusive” or “culturally responsive” practices within inquiry frameworks—as we’ve seen in a number of places—can obscure the distinct purposes and practices associated with each innovation.7 Inquiry’s associations with an instructional “shift”—toward student centeredness, inclusion, or just newness—contribute to a belief that it is more “progressive,” among both its detractors and its proponents.8 These divisions can run through the same schoolhouse, reinforcing generational or ideological camps within a social studies department. One teacher described collaborating with another teacher on an “inquiry-based approach” while their other colleagues taught the same “class we all took.”9 Teachers who are exhausted by waves of reform, or skeptical of “new fandango” approaches, may feel at liberty to resist the latest trend. Meanwhile, admins hoping for systemic shifts may tamp down their own expectations until the next wave of teacher retirements.10 The praiseworthy urge to pose “big questions” in the social studies classroom has also made room for some bad ones. Writing in Perspectives on History last year, we spotted frequent ahistorical missteps in secondary historical inquiry modules: the moral reckoning, the philosophical quandary, and the fanciful counterfactual.11 While never declaring any questions off-limits, we noted that lessons designed to produce blunt judgments or philosophical precepts seemed likely to mislead students about the process and value of learning about the past. Rather than generating bounded insights about the contingent and contextual nature of historical change, “essential” or “compelling” questions often raised the stakes of the activity to address moral or civic questions—while also limiting the source material to a tiny handful of excerpted documents. As historians, we knew that the quirks of inquiry within contemporary curriculum expressed a longer story: of history’s place within the social studies; of the ongoing contest among experts, administrators, and teachers over K–12 instruction; and of the movement for standards and accountability in educational systems worldwide.12 Potted histories of curriculum and instruction are too often susceptible to a Whiggish plot: in the bad old days, teachers taught in bad old ways; the light of inquiry continues to brighten our path today.13 But this history is of course much more rich and complicated—and well worth a visit for teachers struggling to fish out what’s of enduring value from an ocean of online resources or to triage what they want to buy into whenever a round of “innovative” approaches is pushed their way by an enthusiastic administrator. In early nineteenth-century textbooks, history’s role was that of moral tutor, a place to be inspired by examples of “virtue, enterprise, courage, generosity, patriotism” alongside “pictures of the vicious ultimately overtaken by misery and shame”—clear evidence of God’s “benignant dispensations” and “darker judgments.”14 Mentioned, but of “inferior importance,” was history’s ability to chasten the imagination and discipline the mind.15 By the time the first generation of university-trained historians were making their moves to correct the amateurism that they saw surrounding history teaching in primary and secondary schools, mental dispositions had moved to the foreground. In advising a shift from recitation to a deliberate reenactment of historical inquiry, educator and historian Mary Sheldon Barnes echoed the ascendant call among her peers that the teaching of history needed to be invigorated with direct encounters with primary sources and a move away from “mere lists of lifeless dates.”16 Writing in 1889, she described something like the ancestor of the modern inquiry activity: Give the student a little collection of historic data, and extracts from contemporary sources, together with a few questions within his power to answer from these materials. Then let him go by himself.17 Mary Sheldon Barnes. Barnes was clear that these exercises were dramatic simulations, not original investigations. The role of primary sources was to spur the imagination to “touch the very soul” of the historical actor and to “understand and gain historic sympathy, that prime requisite to historic understanding.”18 Gestures toward soul-stirring sympathy became less prominent in the publications of various special committees launched at the turn of the twentieth century, as historians teamed up with school administrators to defend history’s place in general education by underscoring its scientific seriousness and its compatibility with the goals of modern citizenship—a toolbox of “historical-mindedness.”19 For an emerging cohort of Progressive historians, history’s workshop was cluttered with obsolete implements. Even “story” and “event,” New History advocate James Harvey Robinson argued in 1911, were romantic holdovers that distracted teachers from choosing “those phases of the past which serve us best in understanding the most vital problems of the present.”20 Amid Cold War calls for college preparatory rigor, projects like Edwin Fenton’s New Social Studies promised to align high school social studies more tightly to university disciplines. The era produced sturdy templates for K–12 inquiry, most notably the document-based question (DBQ) format of the College Board’s Advanced Placement US history exam.21 Meanwhile, however, a traditionalist critique had grown in opposition to social studies’ trend toward interdisciplinary inquiry. Critics like Chester Finn Jr. and Diane Ravitch argued in the 1980s that established educational practices enabled a “tragic downward spiral that can only erode the culture, trivialize the intellect, and in time pauperize our civic life.”22 Initially anchored in conservative policy circles, these ideas also appealed to a broad common sense among history teachers and the general public: concepts could not be learned free of facts; a common culture required common knowledge. By the 1990s, aspects of traditionalists’ critique spread beyond conservative home bases, as prominent historians like those writing for the Bradley Commission on History in Schools echoed the disenchantment with the “do-your-own-thing formlessness of social studies,” blaming both early twentieth-century Progressives and the science fair–style inquiry of the sixties and seventies.23 The movement for content-rich state standards and subject-specific course requirements reaffirmed history’s distinct role in the curriculum, spawning a crop of new history-focused nonprofits.24 But partisan conservatism famously reasserted itself in 1994, when National Endowment for the Humanities director Lynne Cheney led a lethal high-profile attack against the national history standards initiative that her own department had funded, condemning the product as insufficiently celebratory of American heroes and institutions.25 Cover of National Standards for History. Basic Edition, 1996. National Center for History in the Schools, University of California, Los Angeles. The lesson was clear: recommending “which history” should be taught was likely to put you at the center of a culture war. The most prolific and successful effort to change the subject came from cognitive psychologist Sam Wineburg. Writing in 1999, Wineburg stressed that thinking like a historian was a deeply humanizing project; beyond “names, dates, and stories,” he argued, history’s chief contribution was teaching “the virtue of humility in the face of limits to our knowledge and the virtue of awe in the face of the expanse of human history.”26 The institutional home of Wineburg’s perspective, his Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), founded in the internet age and reared in an era of ambitious new federal educational accountability initiatives, would put things differently.27 SHEG’s extensive (and free) collection of downloadable lessons—which rated among the most popular no-cost resources with teachers we surveyed in our research—anchored historical thinking in the cognitive encounter with primary documents. SHEG’s widely used chart of mental moves—sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, and close reading—clearly helped teachers and students ask the right questions about primary sources. But SHEG materials were largely aloof to the notion of narrative synthesis, and evinced little of Wineburg’s earlier gestures toward humanistic virtues.28 The accountability era had set new incentives, with standardized testing in math and English language arts pushing history “to the wayside” and the Common Core State Standards emphasizing nonfiction literacy.29 In the era of Common Core, SHEG’s advice about how to “read like a historian” could also be sold as preparation for the next ELA test. Common Core State Standards Initiative logo. While SHEG dove down into the components of historical reading, other experts in curriculum and instruction were directing teachers and school leaders upward toward overarching, interdisciplinary questions. Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s highly influential Understanding by Design (1998) encouraged educators to backward-design their courses and units around “essential questions” in service of “enduring understandings.”30 In the social studies world, the UbD call for “open-ended, thought-provoking” questions and transdisciplinary understandings came through clearly in the 2013 C3 Framework for social studies, where inquiry was elevated to its current place as reigning concept—and connected directly to citizenship. As social studies professor Kathy Swan, one of the principal authors of the 2013 C3 Framework and an evangelist for inquiry in contemporary social studies curriculum, puts it, “Inquiry is a … sandbox … where students can play with deliberative conversations about issues and problems and ideas that are critical to living in a diverse democracy.”31 Reflective of inquiry’s ascendance in social studies circles, SHEG has rebranded, from the Stanford History Education Group to the Digital Inquiry Group. A tour through inquiry’s history explains some of the peculiar mismatch that we encountered in many contemporary lessons: a small packet of excerpted documents from a bounded historical moment paired with metaphysical questions about democracy or justice. Curricular reforms rarely supersede prior practices in toto, and those that succeed do so as teachers fit them to preexisting schema and habits of work. New guidance from curricular experts about reading strategies or scaffolded questions can easily be fastened atop older moralistic impulses. If nineteenth-century teachers taught history as a catalog of God’s judgment, twenty-first-century curricula often invite teachers to sub students into the role of divine arbiter, deciding whether Reconstruction was a triumph or a tragedy, or whether Andrew Carnegie is to be admired or condemned. It would be unfair to blame the DBQ or SHEG or UbD or C3 for everything we find lacking in inquiry. We’re as enthusiastic about primary sources as any history teacher. We sympathize strongly with the urge to embed the study of history to a deeper, humanistic quest. 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Source: The American Historical Review
DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhae290
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4402336906