Inquiry plays a vital role in history as a discipline, establishing the methodological procedures by which historians construct knowledge of the past. And it has become an essential organizing principle in history education worldwide. Documents that frame history education in pre-collegiate and high ed classrooms place inquiry at the center of teaching and learning. For example, the AHA’s Association’s Tuning Project features inquiry prominently, putting it first in its “profile and core concepts,” defining history as “an inquiry into human experience” (Tuning Project, 2016). The U.K.’s History Benchmark Statement foregrounds inquiry in asserting that history courses should foster the “ability to ask and answer cogent and focused questions about the past and to pursue these questions through structured enquiry, selecting and interrogating an appropriate range of materials, including primary and historiographical sources of evidence” (Quality Assurance Agency, 2019, p. 9) Likewise, the NCSS’s C3 Framework describes a four dimension “inquiry arc” to should shape all pre-collegiate study in history and the social sciences.

Although central to the discipline and at the heart of school history, we know little about how history instructors use inquiry to teach or how students take up inquiry to learn history. The papers in this session, drawn from a more extensive set of empirical and peer-reviewed inquiry studies in international contexts, seek to add to our understanding of inquiry’s role in history classrooms.

The three theoretical and empirical papers focus on inquiry in history curricula and in history classrooms in Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. Collectively, they address a series of linked questions,

• What does historical inquiry mean in history classrooms, and what forms does it take in different contexts?
• What challenges do beginning teachers face in employing inquiry procedures in the classrooms?
• What hinders teachers from employing inquiry more frequently and successfully in classrooms?
• How is classroom inquiry similar to and different from a disciplinary inquiry conducted by historians?
• What do we know about the affordances and constraints associated with inquiry-based learning in history–what is the evidence of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of inquiry-based historical learning?
• What opportunities does ‘inquiry’ present for the future history curriculum and pedagogy development?

The papers also offer frameworks and suggestions for instructors and researchers on classroom-based historical inquiry. In addition to presenting classroom or curricular case studies, they propose new ways to frame inquiry in instruction and ways to prepare history instructors to use inquiry. The studies ask us to think more closely about how to help students build knowledge through inquiry. Finally, each offers evidence of inquiry’s positive impacts on teaching and learning, pointing to significant challenges.

Drawn from a forthcoming peer-reviewed book on historical inquiry in international contexts, the papers seek to enrich our understanding of inquiry, helping further develop our ways to use inquiry to meet the many challenges in teaching and learning history.