Globalisation and Inquiry-based Learning in Social Studies Education

This book examines the impact of globalization and inquiry-based education that encourages both teachers and learners to frame problems, examine diverse sources, and construct evidence-based conclusions, an obvious and highly demanded pedagogical approach. Globalization has significantly reshaped educational systems and diversified approaches to inquiry-based learning (IBL) by intensifying interconnectedness, cooperation, cultural and social fusion, and the circulation of knowledge across borders.

All education stakeholders actively engage with and benefit from the expanding opportunities to introduce and apply inquiry pedagogies in the classroom. However, these transformations simultaneously create structural and epistemological tensions that complicate and challenge the implementation of IBL. Standardization and the pressures of international assessment, the prevalence of dominant knowledge versus multiperspectivity, the marketization of education, the demand for global competences at the expense of locally contextualized skills and practices, and shrinking teacher autonomy are only a few of the challenges that teachers and administrators who are interested in IBL face in practice. Globalization, therefore, creates a dual pressure on education. It opens up spaces for inquiry through access to global perspectives, collaboration, and real-world problems, while simultaneously constraining it through standardization, marketization, and efficiency. This dialectical relationship between globalization and IBL creates a challenging and at the same time creative space that all education stakeholders should learn how to navigate.

This book presents a scholarly and holistic analysis of how globalization shapes IBL in education and how this relationship influences student engagement and academic achievement.