The Community of Inquiry as a Basis for Knowledge and Learning: The Case of History

Science, social science, literary studies, philosophy, and history have all encountered challenges to the notion of “objectivity” in the wake of the Kuhnian revolution. These challenges, which problematize knowledge itself, have revived interest in the pragmatist notion of knowledge based in a community of inquiry. The related social constructivist recasting of curriculum thought in the past 15 years has been based not so much on the revision in the epistemology of the subject disciplines as in developments in learning theory and psychology. Using the discipline of history as a case study, this paper compares the scholarly community of inquiry with the community of inquiry in the classroom and examines the role of the teacher in negotiating the knowledge generated in each.