Encouraging inquiry in the digital age

Abstract

There is no question that amidst an educational landscape with increasing emphasis on critical thinking and student-driven analysis, there is still substantial work to be done to transition the majority of classrooms in the United States from a regimented, “kill-and-drill” pedagogy to something more inquiry oriented. Waring and Hartshorne’s Conducting Authentic Historical Inquiry: Engaging Learners with SOURCES and Emerging Technologies is a recent contribution to the continued advocacy within the educational academy toward empowerment of student learning within an inquiry-focused classroom. Waring and Hartshorne’s work is practitioneroriented and intended to promote the learning benefits of their SOURCES framework as part of a technology-supported approach to “build[ing] a more complex way of thinking and approaching historical content” (p. ix). In the book’s first half, the authors explain and apply their SOURCES analysis model in conjunction with four curated collections of primary sources. The book’s second half is devoted to identifying and explaining other technology resources that classroom practitioners might find helpful in their efforts to support historical inquiry in their classrooms. As a high school history teacher and PhD candidate who works with preservice social studies teachers, I came to Conducting Authentic Historical Inquiry excited to see where Waring and Hartshorne would join the ongoing conversations in the educational community surrounding inquiry in the contemporary classroom. Informed by my own professional experience, I was interested to see how this book might both inform my own instructional praxis as well as further my work with aspiring teachers as they build their own competencies around student inquiry. The authors situate the utility of a specific pedagogical framework (i.e., SOURCES) as a means for promoting student-driven critical inquiry. Throughout the work, the SOURCES model is featured as a means of encouraging a more in-depth understanding of the past via inquiry. Part I of the work is an extended discussion on defining and applying the various elements of the SOURCES analysis framework to specific historical figures and topics. The acronym is broken down in text as: