At Oaklands we believe knowledge can be empowering, but merely learning a list of facts is not. Therefore we teach History through Enquiry. But what does that mean?
Put simply, teaching through Enquiry involves getting students to always ask questions about the past and - using sources and scholarship - tentatively answer those questions.
Indeed 'enquiring into the past' is what we all do – whether we know it or not. An ‘enquiry question’ is simply a meaningful - and contestable - question about the past that we return to over a series of lessons.
Students in Year 7 begin their study of History by looking at the stories of migrants in Britain over the last thousand years. Included in this study are over a dozen fascinating stories of individuals who have both made the British Isles their home and sought (or been forced) to build a life in other lands. Teaching these stories by themselves would be interesting enough and could be taught by asking Who migrated to and from Britain? but would not be teaching through Enquiry.
Instead we want students to stretch and develop their historical thinking and get them to consider the traces (or sources) they left behind. This allows them to develop their inference skills and therefore repeatedly ask the question - What can we infer from ‘migrant sources’ about the history of the British Isles over a thousand years?
This is a more meaningful question because it develops students inference skills - a crucial skill in their development as a historian. But more so because it is a question that historians - both academic and community historians - have been asking for decades (if not centuries). In particular recent scholarship (Olusoga, Onyeka, Visram) has focused on proving the existence of migrant communities in the UK going back centuries - see below - and working with incomplete sources is something all historians have to do!
More information about this enquiry can be found here.
There are many reasons to teach through enquiry. It empowers our students to ask meaningful questions about the past and come up with their own answers. But it is also supported by decades of educational research. Some of which are linked below :