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Intentional Teaching Of Historical Inquiry Learning

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Children acquire more understanding through personal experience, and as Vince Gowmon once said: “you cannot make people learn, you can only provide the right conditions for learning to happen.” (Basic skills assessment and educational services, 2018). The notion of an educator scaffolded environment for quality application over quantity of knowledge dispensed is an important aspect of the inquiry approach to learning. Inquiry learning ensures that students receive a quality education through carefully scaffolded lessons using investigation and exploration as students pose and answer questions to build and cement personal understandings. This essay will define inquiry learning, and how the implementation of this particular teaching approach …show more content…

Intentional teaching of historical inquiry explores the changes that happen over time while observing specific family-related examples. Curriculum outcome (ACHASSI018) looks at students posing questions about past and present objects, people, places and events. An example, of incorporating this history learning area of the Australian curriculum into a lesson plan can arise from celebrating cultural diversity through national events such as harmony day. Students may attend schooling on harmony day dressed in cultural dress, bring along parents and members of older generations, or display everyday objects relating to their culture or belonging to previous family generations. Collaborating with students families to introduce historical provocation through the sharing of events like harmony day will foster a young child’s social development and enhance their social and cultural knowledge and awareness (Mindes, 2015). Educators would then use the cultural experiences students and family members have shared to spark curiosity and imagination for educators and students to pose questions with the stems of where, what, how, and why that really encourage and deliver open-ended responses, instead of yes and no answers and the memorising of facts. Examples of questions relevant to historical inquiry include are we more the same or different than others, and why?, can someone belong to more than one culture?, how do people live in other places?, how are these places different?, and does technology change our lives for the better ? (Murdoch, 2014). When utilising questions to spark curiosity and imagination as well as extend and test a student’s content knowledge the Stanford history education group cautions educators must be aware to choose and foster questions that elicit historical exploration and debate opposes to generating moral judgements, which is informed more by

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