Embedded Critical Social Inquiry

• In Event: Critical Inquiry in Social Studies Education: Clarifying Directions for Research and Practice

Abstract

Purposes: I enter this space contemplating the relationship between critical, social, and inquiry. I revisit a course I taught and the resultant student work. “Social Inquiry” used multiple embodied experiences in Central Park to generate social observations and questions. Then, student groups pursued social inquiry that extended from their observations. I reexamine students’ social inquiry products to consider how they handled confirming and disconfirming evidence and resultant narratives.
Perspectives: I wonder whether critical scholars have become too willing to be critical of rather than asking critical questions that complexify social understanding (Hoy, 2005). My conceptualization of social understanding draws from Dewey (1938) who suggests that we begin with observations of the social world we embody. I wonder how embodied observation, deliberation, and disagreement might help preservice social studies teachers not become consumed by a messy and antagonist political and social landscape (Mouffe, 2009)

Methods and Data Sources: In this presentation, I conduct a critical textual analysis of student work. Students submitted a research project that documented their trajectory of analysis alongside conclusions. I am interested in rereading these projects to consider three questions that can extend our understanding and development of critical social inquiry:
(1) What is “critical” in these exercises? To what extent does critical deconstruct, is critical productive, and does critical criticize?
(2) How are students taking up their social world? How are students bringing discourse and materiality together in analyzing or making sense of the social world?
(3) What tools and methods do students use to study and analyze their social work in a critical manner?

Results: The presentation will elaborate the sense of criticality. But one example of the analysis is a project that inquires about transportation. The product morphs from a study of the affect and textual awareness of subway stations to a map of how people with disabilities could move between city spaces. While there is an element of critique of lack of accessibility, the ongoing observation and asking of questions also allowed the students to also consider and locate social systems set up to support mobility.

Significance: This presentation is significant partially because it responds to my orientation toward critical social inquiry. However, my orientations align with larger questions in social studies teacher education. The analysis I pursue in learning from how students synthesized a year where we tried to engage them in critical social inquiry can be instructive for others. Not everyone places “social” in critical inquiry. In social studies, though, inquiry is about the social world. Therefore, I want to understand how my students moved between different material and discursive observations to pursue questions that started with the self but allowed them to reorient those selves in the world. This enables a contemplation of the critical. In a particularly volatile time, the balance between criticality, collectivity, civility, deliberation, and change are essential terms and dispositions to engage in teacher education and K-12 classrooms.

Author

• Sandra Schmidt, Teachers College, Columbia University