Historical Inquiry in a Methods Classroom: Examining Our Beliefs and Shedding Our Old Ways
eted phenomenon. S. G. Grant describes it as “the passion for pulling ideas apart and putting them back together” (2000, 196). Historical inquiry as an instructional strategy benefits students and the classroom dynamic. It promotes students’ appreciation of their personal histories while they are exploring others’ histories. Students are more engaged in the subject than they would be in a class in which the teacher requires only rote memorization of minute facts. According to Levstik and Barton (1997), the memorization of isolated facts rarely advances students’ conceptual understanding. Historical inquiry introduces students to the tools of historians and requires them to question, explore, test, and argue their thoughts and opinions. Foster and Padgett capture the essence of the approach, noting that “genuine historical inquiry demands that students learn to ask authentic questions, to select and examine historical evidence, to appreciate historical context, to evaluate divergent perspectives, and to reach, albeit tentatively, logical conclusions” (1999, 2). The study that I report in this article concerns the way in which preservice teachers negotiate historical inquirybased teaching and learning in relation to their preexisting conceptions of social studies as a discipline. Another concern was finding whether having an understanding of historical inquiry influences pedagogy.