Teaching without a textbook: Senior high school citizenship teachers’ inquiry-based teaching and textbook use under the 12-year basic education national curriculum

The latest national curriculum highlights the concept of incorporating inquiry into education. Notably, the introduction of inquiry-based guidelines has begun the process of incorporating inquiry, and more inquiry-related elements have been incorporated into citizenship textbooks. A new course named Inquiry and Practice has been developed that frees teachers from the constraints of textbooks and empowers them to imagine, design, and execute. We interviewed 10 citizenship teachers who reflected on how teachers changed how they used textbooks after the introduction of the new curriculum. In the Inquiry and Practice course, topics related to real-life scenarios and public issues were most commonly explored. In terms of inquiry methods, the combination of “understanding and inquiring about daily life” and “describing facts and quantitative inquiries” was preferred. However, the inquiry process involved various uncertainties, and its recursive trajectory differed from those described in various theories. Teachers learned to plan their lessons without using textbooks. The current study synthetized the interviewees feedback on the latest curriculum and identified a trend in which textbooks shifted from a primary role of dictating the progress of classroom practice to a supportive role as secondary learning resources.