Chapter 10: The Amherst Approach to Inquiry Learning

The Amherst Project was rooted in the idea that the principal goal of history curricula should be teaching students how to learn from the past rather than the transmission of bodies of knowledge, whether new or old. We wanted students to come away from their history courses with insight about how much the study of the past could contribute to their own self-understanding—how rewarding it could be—and with the tools to make historical inquiry possible throughout their lives. We made a distinction between the study of history, and history as a body of knowledge, wanting students to respect and appreciate the latter and to understand its constructivist origins, but to see it in a different way: as evidence to be used in the pursuit of questions that had meaning in their own lives rather than as something to be mastered as an end in itself. We thought that people learned from the past—learned, in fact, from anything—through a process of inquiry, and we sought to make this the core of all that we did.