Above: The bookshelf of a U.S. History teacher at the Facing History School in Manhattan.
A Note on Adapting the Inquiry Question
Over the course of the year the focus of my inquiry question has changed—not dramatically, but significantly—as a result of the generative nature of the inquiry process. I initiated my research with one question, collected evidence from my fieldwork that supported refining it, revised the question, and brought it back to my classrooms to see what the adapted line of inquiry would reveal. In the second semester of my fieldwork, another pass at focusing the question aligns it with the reality of what I am attempting in my classes, and is even more true to the artifacts I am collecting. The changes are the result of me becoming increasingly responsive to what is actually happening in my classes, rather than projecting a research question that is not organic to the environment.
My two placements in very different Small Learning Communities (SLCs) at NCHS have challenged me to create a question that applies to both communities, and the learning environments of three different classrooms. Initially, I thought I would focus my inquiry project on just one classroom: my first pickup, a 9th grade World History class in the Focus on Success program. As the year progressed, it became clear that I was not generating enough evidence from one class alone; additionally, my second and third pickups revealed themselves to be rich environments for inquiry. Although I have shifted my stance to consider artifacts from all three classrooms, my aim is not to compare artifacts across the two SLCs; the variability of contexts is beyond the scope of my question.
My two placements in very different Small Learning Communities (SLCs) at NCHS have challenged me to create a question that applies to both communities, and the learning environments of three different classrooms. Initially, I thought I would focus my inquiry project on just one classroom: my first pickup, a 9th grade World History class in the Focus on Success program. As the year progressed, it became clear that I was not generating enough evidence from one class alone; additionally, my second and third pickups revealed themselves to be rich environments for inquiry. Although I have shifted my stance to consider artifacts from all three classrooms, my aim is not to compare artifacts across the two SLCs; the variability of contexts is beyond the scope of my question.
Version 1 Artifact Afrom Introduction to my Annotated Bibliography, January 20, 2013
Inquiry Question: “What happens to students’ concepts of their agency in their own lives when they study the “contingency” of authorship in history?” Sub-question: If authors are individuals whose views are the product of subjective personal and cultural perspectives, and students can find reason to trust those authors (or not,) then how can students use their individuality to question and understand the world around them, and “narrate” their own lives? Introduction: "My inquiry question is seeking evidence of students’ self-conceptualization through academic work, self-reflective surveys, overt behavior (documented through observations,) and other research tools. This bibliography addresses the need for sources that both appeal to and challenge the inquiry question. Because my artifact analyses will attempt to find evidence of how students conceive of themselves, I need sources that help me explain how their writing, talking, and behavior might explain their self conceptualization. The list of sources will help me analyze the student, the teacher, the curriculum/lessons, and the school context. It is important to note that a major component of the inquiry project is an original teaching unit I designed and plan to teach in one of my classes in February–March of this year. The unit explores the role of the individual in my students’ immediate lives and in episodes in history. At this point, one weakness of my bibliography is that my current readings do not attend to the issue of “agency.” I need additional critical perspectives on this idea to make sure that I can explain the concept of student agency, analyze evidence of “agency” in my students’ work, and support the idea that agency might matter to students’ academic and personal development." Artifact Bfrom Artifact Analysis 1: Revising the Media Analysis Worksheet
Inquiry Question: What happens to students' concepts of individual agency when they use first-person reasoning in historical analysis? "The process of revising the Media Analysis Worksheet directly contributed to a revision in my inquiry question. I had been intending to narrow my question but had not yet realized how. With my PM’s suggestion to focus on “first person prompts,” I realized that my question would benefit from the inclusion of the same parameter. A recent reading from my SS methods course supported the change: Stephen Wolk’s “Teaching for Critical Literacy in Social Studies” insists that the purpose of critical literacy is “to empower [students] with multiple perspectives and questioning habits.” This phrase, “questioning habits” is at the root of the media analysis unit and is part of the thrust of my inquiry question (which focuses on this class, but not my others.) While it was previously much broader, my question now reads: What happens to students' concepts of individual agency when they use first-person reasoning in historical analysis? Wolk’s article calls for the “questioning habits” on which the “individual agency” and “first-person reasoning” in my question relies. For a student to question a text, I think they need to be able to identify themselves in the act of questioning: “I know this, therefore this does not make sense;” “I don’t understand this, therefore I need to know more about that.” In the unit I taught this week (more on it in Reflection 2,) students analyzed news photographs using a 3-part process: Observe, Reflect, Question. My 2nd draft of a graphic organizer students used for this process introduced first-person prompts that I hadn’t used in the 1st draft. It read, “In the image I see…”, “Based on my observations, the image might be about …”, “After observing and reflecting, I still have questions about …”. With the introduction of these first-person prompts, I believe students were able to start asking questions from their own perspective, rather than wondering what sort of questions were “important” to ask. In this exercise in particular, the purpose of asking questions is to acknowledge that further research/additional knowledge is necessary to fully understand what is happening in the image. The questioning allows students to connect the static image to a world of contextual information. With Wolk’s help, I will be somewhat better equipped to create more lessons that require questioning (even without answering,) and look for evidence around my students’ “questioning habits.” I should have come to this realization during our many dozens of pages of reading about inquiry, but somehow it only happened just now. In the future, I think I will require that students use the first-person prompts to write complete sentences about what they Observe, Reflect, and Question, so I can have concrete evidence of their use of the first person, and so they might internalize, however implicitly, the relevance of their individual perspective in the analysis." |
AnalysisThe question I proposed at the start of my inquiry project focused on how academic work affected students’ self-conception, in and out of the classroom. But I struggled to identify evidence of “self-conception” in students’ work, my observations, and one-on-one conversations with students. Additionally, I wasn’t getting deep enough in my teaching of “historical thinking,” particularly in my first pickup, to teach lessons that genuinely examined the “contingency of authorship in history.” My undergraduate research in history examined the idea that historians are individuals who possess subjective perspectives that become a part of the recording and telling of history. By considering the historian as an “individual,” I believe that students of history can draw connections between the “contingency” of truth in history, and the subjectivity of different perspectives in their own lives. My goal is for students to identify perspective as a stance that all individuals possess. But in my practice as a teacher of social studies, I’m not yet sophisticated (or confident) enough to facilitate those ideas in the classroom. With my original question I intended to connect my long-term interest in historiography to my current practice—after a couple of months in the classroom, I realized that I simply wasn’t going to get there this year.
In my first revision of the inquiry question I adapted its focus in two dimensions: First, rather than focusing on “students’ concepts of their agency in their own lives,” I expanded the question to examine “individual agency” in general. With this, I shifted the focus away from how the content affected the student to how the student thinks about individual agency, which can include the student, individual figures in history, and even historians. Second, I added a particular modality, “first-person reasoning,” in order to constrain what I was examining in the classroom. This has allowed me to design activities in which students write or perform from their own perspectives or borrow the stance of an individual in history (real or imagined). The question moved away from self-concept, towards students’ ability to discern among perspectives. When I look back to my original question, I realize that perhaps my attention to “perspective,” now, is the high-school-friendly version of my interest in the “contingency” of authorship in history. It has taken a few moves for me to arrive near where I started. The transformation of my inquiry question matches the shifting focus of my lesson planning in recent months: I am finding ways to hook students using authentic connections to their own lives, which then allows them to compare their perspective to someone’s in history, and ultimately test out occupying the perspective of someone entirely not themselves. In some of my classes, my attempts to have students use the first person to explore episodes in history has been superficial. Without a successful transition among perspectives, students remain well-situated in the present. But in the successful moments, I start with students’ own experience, introduce an historical perspective, and then attempt to construct a bridge for them to arrive inside a perspective that is not their own. Even if their occupation lasts for a short time, or results in the composition of a single 6-word memoir, this is where I see students learning authentically about history. My findings call for a second revision to the inquiry question. If my Penn Mentor will allow it, I will land on this, my “final” question in an inquiry that will likely persist for years to come: What happens to students' ability to identify different perspectives in history when they use first-person reasoning in historical analysis? |