Good Question: Right-Sizing Inquiry with History Teachers

This module is part of the #AHRSyllabus project. More information about the project can be found on the AHR website under #AHRSyllabus. Learn more about the AHA’s Mapping the Landscape of Secondary US History Education.

“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.

Whitney E Barringer, Scot McFarlane, and Nicholas Kryczka

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.”

Read the module in full here.