From Corn Chips to Garbology: The Dynamics of Historical Inquiry

What can corn chips teach us about history? Quite a bit, as participants learned at a History Education Clearinghouse workshop at the 2011 American Historical Association annual meeting. Upon arriving for the workshop, we found sandwich baggies filled with golden-brown chips on every seat. Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Harvard Project Zero director Shari Tishman used the chips as artifacts to lead the participants through a See/Think/Wonder exercise. They provided a thinking routine that provokes inquiry about artifacts—even the mundane corn chip—that is useful for learners of all ages (Figure 1). By encouraging detailed observation and turning the ordinary into a voyage of exploration, See/Think/ Wonder teases out many historical questions and connections: from corn planters and pickers to ethnobotany and the history of cooking, from African American work songs to Native American creation stories, from agribusiness to manufacturing to ethanol (1). A month later, one of the authors of this article repeated the same exercise with a cohort of K–12 teachers. They noted how corn chips and the step-by-step thinking process provide a flexible vehicle for moving from personal connections through intriguing questions to investigation. After that workshop, one of the teachers decided to test the exercise with her fourth graders, giving them magnifying glasses to help them inspect the chips in greater detail. “Students came up with the same questions that our cohort came up with back in February,” Teresa Robbins reported. “I was so surprised and proud that they used higher order thinking skills to formulate these questions. They asked about the families that were involved in growing the corn, the brand and its historical significance, the factory that it was produced at, the packaging that was used, and many other questions” (2). As the corn chip story illustrates, a growing number of teachers are finding ways to cultivate these higher order skills and habits by engaging their students in a systematic process of historical inquiry (3). To help teachers think more deeply about the dynamics of inquiry and to foster it in their classrooms, this article presents a theoretical inquiry framework that provides context, purpose, and shape to historical thinking. We construct this framework by combining Barbara Stripling’s existing model of inquiry with our own Dual Inquiry (DI) model. Whereas Stripling’s model focuses on the learner’s inquiry process, the DI model captures inquiry from the teacher’s perspective, describing the dual roles of teacher-as-learner and teacher-as-teacher. With the aim of enabling teachers to draw practical inspiration from our model, we have provided a number of concrete illustrations, including applications to the upcoming year’s theme for National History Day.