Bounded Inquiry: A Tool for Considering Historical Investigations in the K–12 Classroom

How is inquiry brought into the crowded K-12 history curricula in a meaningful way? Inquiry is recommended and prescribed by the AHA, other professional organizations, available curricula, and some states’ policies. But given the breadth and diversity of the field of history and historical investigations, it is not clear what K-12 historical inquiry can and should look like. Bounded inquiry is an idea that helps manage this complexity. Through applying this concept to four open source, U.S. published, curricula -- National History Day, C3 Teachers materials, SHEG’s Reading Like a Historian curricula, and Digital Public Library of America Primary Sources -- this paper discusses the power of bounded inquiry to serve as both spotlight and scaffold for practitioners and researchers. Using specific examples, we will look at how the concept of bounded inquiry, informed by Seixas’(1993) ideas around different learning communities and Shulman’s (1987) idea of pedagogical content knowledge, can illuminate and surface what we value and practice in the classroom relevant to historical inquiry. The paper argues that instructors or curricula can appropriately bound inquiry by separating such elements as questioning and evaluating the credibility of a limited number of sources while discarding other more complex components, such as those involved in conducting a complete investigation as a historian would. Topics discussed will include teachers’ uptake of inquiry, a comparison with ideas and practices from science education, a focus on inquiry as a set of processes rather than a set of prescribed steps, and political contexts that matter to teaching historical inquiry in high school classrooms.