ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I report the results of an intrinsic case study of barriers to inquiry instruction that arise and are overcome during a year of project-based instruction in one eighth-grade teacher’s integrated English and history course. This study specifically focuses on the curriculum events and instruction-learning process associated with an 18-week unit about ancient Egyptian civilization. Few case studies of the classroom enactment of a middle-grades history curriculum-in-use (Cornbleth, 1990) have been reported in the social studies and history literature. Moreover, those studies that have been reported do not offer insights into the barriers to teaching and learning interactions of inquiry that a teacher, without graduate school education, and his or her students together overcome. Some of the barriers encountered in this case study are students’ lack of strategic skills needed to engage in inquiries, limited prior knowledge about the subject matter, their need to accept an unfamiliar role as co-constructor of at least parts of the curriculum and question asker, and avoiding trivial projects that do not adequately exploit the opportunity to learn through inquiry. We shall explore these through the case study of one teacher newly implementing an inquiry curriculum.
