Professional witnessing: Preparing preservice teachers for pedagogical and equitable responsiveness in inquiry design

This qualitative case study introduces professional witnessing, a framework for examining how preservice teachers integrate disciplinary and pedagogical reasoning with equitable responsiveness into the design of inquiry-based lessons. Professional witnessing functions as both an analytic lens and a pedagogical orientation, shaping an elementary social studies methods course. Drawing on interview and reflection data from six preservice teachers, the study examines how participants articulated professional witnessing in their planning processes. Findings indicate that preservice teachers expressed professional witnessing through three dimensions: noticing disciplinary knowledge and identifying conceptual gaps, designing with pedagogical flexibility by engaging in pedagogical reasoning through anticipatory planning and visualization, and demonstrating equitable responsiveness by attending to students’ lived experiences and access to learning. Equitable responsiveness emerged as the most consistently articulated dimension in participants’ accounts. The study demonstrates that inquiry design can support preservice teachers in integrating disciplinary reasoning with attention to students’ experiences and offers a conceptual framework for analyzing inquiry lesson design as both technical and equity-oriented work.