ABSTRACT
About a decade ago, I taught a diverse group of fifth graders over some16 weeks to learn to think historically in an effort to deepen their historical understandings of the American past. We pursued history as an investigative endeavor in which we began with historical questions that have long animated the work of other investigators. My purpose was to test an idea borne out by my own and others’ research that investigating the past through rich questions and teaching students how to think their way toward answering them would enhance their historical understandings in ways that common, textbook-centered practices typically do not. A closely tethered goal was to use this process of investigating others’ lives to help students come to better understand who they were and are becoming with the hope that this would begin to create in them the capacity to critically read and assess the nature of the complex culture in which they lived.
