Getting critical with compelling questions: Shifts in elementary teacher candidates’ curriculum planning from inquiry to critical inquiry

ABSTRACT

While recognized as a foundational practice, social studies educators struggle with enacting inquiry-based instruction. With critical inquiries that examine sociopolitical and other injustices, developing aligned compelling questions represents a challenge, particularly for elementary teachers. Informed by four lenses of criticality from social studies scholarship, this design-based mixed methods research follows 28 elementary teacher candidates from two universities and regions as they formulated compelling questions for critical inquiry units together. Data sources included audio transcriptions of group discussions, course assignments, curriculum planning documents, and reflections. Qualitative and quantitative findings show that candidates created more critical questions with the intervention scaffold, suggesting a new criterion for determining open questions: identifying ongoing issues of empirical injustice. Most still struggled with identifying implicated social groups and clarifying relationships of interdependence. Group members’ positional awareness of sociopolitical identities appeared to support more critical collective question design trajectories through understandings of structure, agency, and place relative to the content. Results suggest the importance of scaffolding critical inquiry question development—with special care to support teacher candidates’ sociopolitical consciousness, and consider their and K-12 students’ implicated identities in power systems, situated in specific teaching contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical inquiry
• critical pedagogy
• design-based research
• inquiry-based learning
• lesson design
• mixed methods
• social studies
• teacher education
• teacher identities

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to our students, as well as Dr. Lisa Sibbett, who supported conceptualization of these four lenses of criticality and coding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For brevity, we focus here on interdisciplinary and/or civic-leaning social studies education research, although scholarship in critical historical inquiry offers valuable and often overlapping pathways for critical inquiry (e.g., Blevins & Salinas, 2012; Blevins et al., 2020; Salinas et al., 2016; Santiago & Dozono, 2022).

2. Like many who study Critical Race Theory, we use lower case for white racial identification to avoid unintentionally reifying white supremacy.