Publication Date

January 16, 2025

Perspectives Section

Features

AHA Topic

Research & Publications, Teaching & Learning, Undergraduate Education

Thematic

Teaching Methods

This essay is part of “What Is Scholarship Today?

Since leaving full-time contingent faculty life for secure employment in academic administration, I’ve wondered, Am I still a historian, or just someone who trained as a historian years ago? I no longer spend time in archives or publish scholarly writing. But I do create inquiry-based curricular materials for my courses, work that requires many of the skills of historical scholarship.

In addition to my administrative work, I teach as an adjunct at a community college, where I’ve centered my US history survey classes on inquiries, usually five each semester. It’s an approach I learned during a brief stint as a high school history teacher. Inquiries are unit lessons grouped around an interpretive question, often called the compelling question. Students use primary sources to answer a series of supporting questions that lead up to the main one. Inquiries do not create new knowledge but rather reframe content for students to encourage new insights.

Creating a good compelling question starts with the same things that are important when starting academic research: familiarity with scholarly literature and a sense of which questions matter most. Materials I saved from preparing for my comprehensive exams have been invaluable. I use them to refresh my memory of scholarly conversations and to identify books to revisit, both for understanding the questions asked and arguments made and to mine the footnotes for primary sources. Inquiries require subquestions, helping students break the main interpretive task into smaller steps. Scholarly work often follows a similar pattern. Experience analyzing an author’s main argument, secondary arguments, and use of evidence helps in building solid inquiries. It turns out that preparing for comprehensive exams was one of the most useful parts of my graduate education.

Inquiries do not create new knowledge but rather reframe content for students to encourage new insights.

It’s hard to get inquiry design right, and it’s exhilarating when you do. As Whitney E. Barringer, Lauren Brand, and Nicholas Kryczka pointed out in “No Such Thing as a Bad Question?” (Perspectives, September 2023), some compelling questions promote binary thinking, abstract philosophizing, or a sense of moral superiority to the past. Instead, I aim to use inquiries that balance complexity and clarity. There’s a reason many inquiries have a black-and-white compelling question. Sometimes nuanced questions need refining to land well in the classroom. When I asked students to evaluate how abolitionists drew on and challenged the context of their times, they got lost. Asking instead whether abolitionists were smart strategists provides better focus, with the subquestions and our discussion of the sources providing more complexity. Likewise, more philosophical questions can work with the right guidance. “Was ‘revolution’ an appropriate label for the protest movements of the 1960s?” risks abstraction but remains grounded in historical context when we seek to understand why the term appealed to certain people in a certain time.

Both scholarship and inquiry design can be solitary endeavors, but both are richer with collaboration. I’m most confident in my inquiries on mid-20th-century American topics because that is the period I know best. It’s harder for me to create inquiries on topics outside my areas of expertise. In those cases, I do a lot more reading and a lot more digging through footnotes to find potential primary sources. Then comes the search for accessible digitized sources and the risk of getting stuck in endless internet search mode. Unfortunately, when teaching is a side job, there are fewer opportunities to collaborate more directly with others.

I’ve often wished for a forum where I could seek advice from historians with expertise in other areas about the ideal sources to use or ways to reframe my questions. Better yet would be more historians creating and sharing inquiries with each other, perhaps even peer-reviewing each other’s work. Websites like C3 Teachers are a start but are geared to the K–12 classroom. We need collaborative spaces for those teaching at the college level. But we’re unlikely to get this until we recognize teaching for what it is: scholarship.

Holly Scott is an adjunct assistant professor at Piedmont Virginia Community College and preadmission and academic program advisor at the University of Virginia.

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