“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.”
Inquiry Everywhere
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
Missteps and Mismatches
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.
Inquiry: A Selective History
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 Defense of Medium-Sized Questions
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. And we’ve all had the experience of provoking students with a hot or topical question to spur their engagement. Still, with inquiry’s edges blurring, we feel the need to articulate a defense of historical questions as a distinct genre.
The way historians ask and answer questions—about historical cause and consequence, change over time, context, complexity, and contingency—is special among the humanities.32 Historians certainly argue about what constitutes evidence, but ultimately history must be physically, spatially, and temporally grounded. Because our tools are imperfect, however, historical work also requires a good deal of humility. As the AHA published in the 2016 Discipline Core, students emerging from history courses should “recognize the provisional nature of knowledge, the disciplinary preference for complexity, and the comfort with ambiguity that history requires”—which means accepting what can and cannot be defined, grasped, or understood.33
In our view, striking this balance of confidence and humility inherent to history requires that historical questions speak directly to the evidence at hand—as Mary Sheldon Barnes insisted over a century ago. Civic or philosophical questions regularly spill over these edges, asking students to consult their morals as guidance or to interrogate their definition of the civic good or patriotism. If zooming out to philosophical questions asks history to answer too much for us, then the zooming in of inquiry on disembodied excerpts asks too little of history, converting historical reasoning into a nonfiction literacy training module. When students get stuck in the ELA roundabout, they miss the chance to string together evidence into narrative interpretation. History comes not just in questions or documents but in stories.
Questions should ask students to do deep and critical reading while being transparent about what the student cannot know and should not suppose. A historical question can be posed differently depending on scope. It matters, for instance, whether a question is meant to kick off a monthlong research project or be answered in an in-class essay. But the historical question is ultimately limited, regardless of venue. We agree with many of inquiry’s proponents that good historical questions should allow for multiple answers. If a question has one right answer, then it does not reward curiosity, risk-taking, or debate. Take these examples, which we found in actual K–12 lessons, and how a bit of rephrasing can facilitate opportunities for deeper historical thinking.
| OriginalQuestion | Historical Rewrite |
|---|---|
| Did the British monarchy truly violate the colonists’ rights as Englishmen? | How did some colonists come to conclude that the British king and Parliament had violated their rights as Englishmen? Why did Parliament disagree? |
| Was Nat Turner a hero or a madman? | How did different groups of Americans use Nat Turner’s story to bolster their own causes? |
| Was the US justified in its war against Mexico? | Who was convinced by arguments justifying (and opposing) the US war with Mexico, and why? |
| Was Reconstruction mostly a story of triumph or tragedy for African Americans? | How did African Americans respond to the political efforts to defeat Reconstruction? |
| Was Andrew Carnegie a philanthropist or a robber baron? | How did industrial capitalists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller use their wealth to shape their legacy? |
| Was it necessary for Japanese Americans to be placed in internment camps during World War II? | Why did voices within the US government propose incarceration of Japanese Americans? How did those opposed to the policy argue their case against internment? |
| Was legal US racial discrimination in the North more damaging than racial discrimination in the South? | How did differences between northern and southern racial discrimination shape the strategies pursued by civil rights organizers? |
| OriginalQuestion | Historical Rewrite |
|---|---|
| Did the British monarchy truly violate the colonists’ rights as Englishmen? | How did some colonists come to conclude that the British king and Parliament had violated their rights as Englishmen? Why did Parliament disagree? |
| Was Nat Turner a hero or a madman? | How did different groups of Americans use Nat Turner’s story to bolster their own causes? |
| Was the US justified in its war against Mexico? | Who was convinced by arguments justifying (and opposing) the US war with Mexico, and why? |
| Was Reconstruction mostly a story of triumph or tragedy for African Americans? | How did African Americans respond to the political efforts to defeat Reconstruction? |
| Was Andrew Carnegie a philanthropist or a robber baron? | How did industrial capitalists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller use their wealth to shape their legacy? |
| Was it necessary for Japanese Americans to be placed in internment camps during World War II? | Why did voices within the US government propose incarceration of Japanese Americans? How did those opposed to the policy argue their case against internment? |
| Was legal US racial discrimination in the North more damaging than racial discrimination in the South? | How did differences between northern and southern racial discrimination shape the strategies pursued by civil rights organizers? |
| OriginalQuestion | Historical Rewrite |
|---|---|
| Did the British monarchy truly violate the colonists’ rights as Englishmen? | How did some colonists come to conclude that the British king and Parliament had violated their rights as Englishmen? Why did Parliament disagree? |
| Was Nat Turner a hero or a madman? | How did different groups of Americans use Nat Turner’s story to bolster their own causes? |
| Was the US justified in its war against Mexico? | Who was convinced by arguments justifying (and opposing) the US war with Mexico, and why? |
| Was Reconstruction mostly a story of triumph or tragedy for African Americans? | How did African Americans respond to the political efforts to defeat Reconstruction? |
| Was Andrew Carnegie a philanthropist or a robber baron? | How did industrial capitalists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller use their wealth to shape their legacy? |
| Was it necessary for Japanese Americans to be placed in internment camps during World War II? | Why did voices within the US government propose incarceration of Japanese Americans? How did those opposed to the policy argue their case against internment? |
| Was legal US racial discrimination in the North more damaging than racial discrimination in the South? | How did differences between northern and southern racial discrimination shape the strategies pursued by civil rights organizers? |
| OriginalQuestion | Historical Rewrite |
|---|---|
| Did the British monarchy truly violate the colonists’ rights as Englishmen? | How did some colonists come to conclude that the British king and Parliament had violated their rights as Englishmen? Why did Parliament disagree? |
| Was Nat Turner a hero or a madman? | How did different groups of Americans use Nat Turner’s story to bolster their own causes? |
| Was the US justified in its war against Mexico? | Who was convinced by arguments justifying (and opposing) the US war with Mexico, and why? |
| Was Reconstruction mostly a story of triumph or tragedy for African Americans? | How did African Americans respond to the political efforts to defeat Reconstruction? |
| Was Andrew Carnegie a philanthropist or a robber baron? | How did industrial capitalists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller use their wealth to shape their legacy? |
| Was it necessary for Japanese Americans to be placed in internment camps during World War II? | Why did voices within the US government propose incarceration of Japanese Americans? How did those opposed to the policy argue their case against internment? |
| Was legal US racial discrimination in the North more damaging than racial discrimination in the South? | How did differences between northern and southern racial discrimination shape the strategies pursued by civil rights organizers? |
Our rewritten historical questions—which assume access to primary documents and supplemental background instruction—step away from normative judgment and toward the how and why of history. Limiting the scope of questions in this way allows students to think deeply, but without making the selected sources stand in for the opinions of all Americans or the student’s own values. It also prevents students from arbitrarily throwing themselves behind one position or another. How and why questions may be less sensational than “you be the judge” questions, but they are far from simple: they ask about the motives and interests behind competing perspectives in the historical record, about the play of contexts and structures on human agency, about the collision of long-run continuities with sudden contingencies, and about the relationships among different domains of human activity (economy, politics, culture). When students answer questions grounded in these complex contexts, they necessarily wrestle with perspective taking, interpretation, and ambiguity; inquiry need not stack the deck to raise the stakes.
In multiple interviews, teachers reported that social studies classrooms are akin to a town square. Students feel safest there to ask big questions, discover new ones with their peers, and begin to find their voices. A democratic society implies a need for spaces like these, and our advice about right-sizing historical questions should not be mistaken as a call for limiting avenues of expression and self-discovery for students. A philosophical question can give students a chance to combine historical arguments with their other knowledge. Even binary and counterfactual questions can be instructive, inviting students to weigh evidence in relation to provocative or entertaining arguments without having to commit to them. But so long as history is understood as part of an education for informed citizenship, as 94 percent of teachers we surveyed believe it is, then we also need to take time to distinguish and delimit history’s insights from civic or political debates. History does not script the future. And yet history is deeply relevant. Right-sizing the types of questions we ask in a history class allows students to see what history can do for them, and what they must do for themselves.
Author Biography
Whitney E. Barringer is a researcher at the American Historical Association. She previously taught history and interdisciplinary seminar courses at the University of Central Arkansas from 2017 to 2022.
Scot McFarlane is a researcher at the American Historical Association. At Columbia University he taught Rivers, Politics, and Power in the United States. He now focuses on bringing river history into K-12 schools nationwide.
Nicholas Kryczka is a research coordinator at the American Historical Association and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Newberry Library. A historian of schools and cities, he has taught at the University of Chicago and the Chicago Public Schools.
Interview with high school social studies teacher (HST 913), August 15, 2023.
Interview with high school social studies teacher (HST 427), July 25, 2023.
Interview with high school social studies teacher (HST 913), August 15, 2023.
See, for instance, National Council for the Social Studies, 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 (Silver Spring, MD: National Council for the Social Studies, 2013); “The Inquiry Design Model,” C3 Teachers, https://c3teachers.org/idm/; “C3 Framework: Inquiry Showcase,” National Council for the Social Studies, https://www.socialstudies.org/professional-learning/inquiry-showcase; and “2023 Conference Resources,” National Social Studies Leaders Association, https://www.socialstudiesleaders.org/.
Interview with high school social studies teacher (HST 605), July 10, 2023.
Interview with social studies administrator (SSA 515), November 12, 2022.
Asif Wilson, “Faculty Viewpoint: Leading Inclusive, Inquiry-Based Teaching and Learning,” University of Illinois, College of Education, Communications Office, May 24, 2022, https://education.illinois.edu/about/news-events/news/article/2022/05/24/faculty-viewpoint-leading-inclusive-inquiry-based-teaching-and-learning.
Interview with social studies administrator (SSA 802), March 10, 2023.
Interview with high school social studies teacher (HST 427), July 25, 2023.
Interview with high school social studies teacher (HST 419), June 7, 2023; interview with high school social studies teacher (HST 725), August 30, 2023.
Whitney E. Barringer, Lauren Brand, and Nicholas Kryczka, “No Such Thing as a Bad Question?,” Perspectives on History 61, no. 6 (September 2023), https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/no-such-thing-as-a-bad-question-inquiry-based-learning-in-the-history-classroom-september-2023/.
On the global rise of professionalization and accountability in education, see Heinz-Dieter Meyer, Daniel Tröhler, David F. Labaree, and Ethan L. Hutt, “Accountability: Antecedents, Power, and Processes,” Teachers College Record 116, no. 9 (2014): 1–12; Ethan L. Hutt, “‘Seeing like a State’ in the Postwar Era: The Coleman Report, Longitudinal Datasets, and the Measurement of Human Capital,” History of Education Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2017): 615–25; Antoni Verger, Lluís Parcerisa, and Clara Fontdevila, “The Growth and Spread of Large-Scale Assessments and Test-Based Accountabilities: A Political Sociology of Global Education Reforms,” Educational Review 71, no. 1 (2019): 5–30; and Christian Ydesen and Sherman Dorn, “The No Child Left Behind Act in the Global Architecture of Educational Accountability,” History of Education Quarterly 62, no. 3 (2022): 268–90.
See, for instance, Stuart J. Foster and Charles S. Padgett, “Authentic Historical Inquiry in the Social Studies Classroom,” Clearing House 72, no. 6 (1999): 357–63; Bruce A. VanSledright, The Challenge of Rethinking History Education: On Practices, Theories, and Policy (New York: Routledge, 2011); James W. Loewen, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited about Doing History, 2nd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2018); and Rosalie Metro, Teaching U.S. History Thematically: Document-Based Lessons for the Secondary Classroom, 2nd ed. (New York: Teachers College Press, 2023). For more self-conscious and nuanced (if still triumphant) accounts of the march of reform in history teaching, see Lendol Calder, “Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey,” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (2006): 1358–70, and Joel M. Sipress and David J. Voelker, “The End of the History Survey Course: The Rise and Fall of the Coverage Model,” Journal of American History 97, no. 4 (2011): 1050–66.
Charles A. Goodrich, A History of the United States of America (Boston: A. K. White, 1827), 5, 6.
Goodrich, A History of the United States of America, 6.
Albert Bushnell Hart, Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies (New York: American Book Company, 1894), 168.
Mary Sheldon Barnes, “General History in the High School,” The Academy: A Journal of Secondary Education, 4, no. 5 (June 1889), 288.
Barnes, “General History in the High School,” 288.
Andrew C. McLaughlin, Herbert B. Adams, George L. Fox, Albert Bushnell Hart, Charles H. Haskins, Lucy M. Salmon, and H. Morse Stephens, The Study of History in Schools: Report to the American Historical Association by the Committee of Seven (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 24.
James Harvey Robinson, “The New History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 50, no. 199 (1911): 179–90, here 190. For Robinson’s mark on the modern social studies, see Arthur William Dunn, comp., The Social Studies in Secondary Education: A Six-Year Program Adapted Both to the 6-3-3 and the 8-4 Plans of Organization (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 43. See discussion in David Warren Saxe, Social Studies in the Schools: A History of the Early Years (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 88, 166-169. For revisions, see Thomas Fallace, “The Effects of Life Adjustment Education on the U.S. History Curriculum, 1948-1957,” The History Teacher 44, no. 4 (2011), 569-589.
See Edwin Fenton, “The New Social Studies: Implications for School Administration,” Bulletin of the National Association of Secondary School Principals 51, no. 317 (1967): 62–73; Edwin Fenton, Teaching the New Social Studies in Secondary Schools: An Inductive Approach (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966); and Edwin Fenton, “Inquiry Techniques in the New Social Studies,” High School Journal 55, no. 1 (1971): 28–40. For accounts of the fall of the New Social Studies, see Hazel Hertzberg, Social Studies Reform, 1880-1980 (Boulder, Colorado: Social Science Education Consortium Publications, 1981), 115-118; Ronald Evans, The Social Studies Wars: What Should We Teach the Children (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004), 139-147; and Larry Cuban, Teaching History Then and Now: A Story of Stability and Change in Schools (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2016), 79-87.
Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 20.
Kenneth T. Jackson and Barbara B. Jackson, “Why the Time Is Right to Reform the History Curriculum,” in Historical Literacy: The Case for History in American Education, ed. Paul Gagnon and the Bradley Commission on History in Schools (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 3–15, here 6. Recent scholarship casts doubt on the claim advanced by many writing in the moment of the Bradley Commission that social studies had ever replaced or displaced history in most K–12 courses of study. See Thomas Fallace, “Did the Social Studies Really Replace History in American Secondary Schools?,” Teachers College Record 110, no. 10 (2008): 2245–70.
New clearinghouses included the National Center for History in the Schools (1988), the National Center for History Education (1990), and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (1994). By 2002, all but two US states had adopted state-level standards for social studies.
See Lynne Cheney, “The End of History,” Wall Street Journal, October 22, 1994, A22, and Gary B. Nash, Charlotte A. Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Vintage Books, 2000).
Sam Wineburg, “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts,” Phi Delta Kappan 80, no. 7 (1999): 488–99, here 491, 498. For an exemplary collection of essays synthesizing both the cognitive turn in history teaching and the “history, not heritage” emphasis at the turn of the millennium, see Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, eds., Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
Relevant contexts include George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (2002), Barack Obama’s Race to the Top grant competition (2009) and Every Student Succeeds Act (2015), and the National Governors Association’s Common Core initiative (2010).
See, for instance, Wineburg’s characterization of SHEG’s curriculum as “not driven by a single, unified narrative,” and that it purposefully poses questions that “don’t have a single right answer.” Stanford History Education Group, “Teaching Students to Think like Historians,” March 4, 2012, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSey4WALf8I.
Stanford History Education Group, “Reading like a Historian,” May 6, 2015, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnWnLNSZTAg&t=67s.
An essential question, in Wiggins and McTighe’s widely adopted advice, is a “provocative and generative” question meant to “stimulate thought, provoke inquiry, and to spark more questions,” which move students away from the details and toward “key concepts, themes, theories, issues, and problems that reside within the content.” Grant P. Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2013), 3, 5; Grant P. Wiggins and Jay McTighe, Understanding by Design (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998).
Kathy Swan, “Why Inquiry?” Making Inquiry Possible, 2021, video, https://staging.makinginquirypossible.org/why-inquiry/#single/0.
Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke, “What Does It Mean to Think Historically?” Perspectives on History 45, no. 1 (January 2007), https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/what-does-it-mean-to-think-historically-january-2007/.
“AHA History Tuning Project: 2016 History Discipline Core,” American Historical Association, 2016, https://www.historians.org/resource/history-discipline-core/.
