ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the ways Anne’s students, in an undergraduate content literacy course for preservice social studies teachers, grappled with the two core epistemological challenges that correspond to the fourth and fi fth phases of the inquiry process: synthesizing fi ndings and communicating new ideas. We describe the ways Anne prepared her students for these challenges and we explore the work produced by the six groups of students with their different disciplinary foci (History, Economics, Psychology, Sociology, Government, Geography). Similar to Chapter 7, our analysis in this chapter highlights the signifi cance of collective sense-making and “progressive problem-solving” (Zhang, 2009) as the students engaged in the sophisticated tasks of synthesizing fi ndings and devising approaches to communicate, in the most clear and compelling way, the results from their group investigations of capitalism and global trade. Along the way we can see some of the ground they covered (the content of their inquiry), the tools vital to their travels (methods of collaborative inquiry), and their emergent knowledge-building as an inquiry community. Their work also illumines the ways relational cosmopolitanism can frame the ways future social studies teachers might be inducted into the profession.
