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147Journal of Science Teacher Education, 13(2): 147-165, 2002©2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Printed in the Netherlands
Elementary Preservice Teachers’ Struggles to Define Inquiry-based
Science Teaching
Michael T. HayesDepartment of Teaching and Learning, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington,
99164-2132, U.S.A.
The National Science Teacher Educator Standards suggest that engaging
preservice elementary teachers in the professional standards for science teaching
should be the top priority for science teacher educators (Association for the
Education of Teachers of Science, 1999). Inquiry forms of teaching currently
command a central position in recommendations for science teaching practice
(Flick, 1997). As stated in the National Science Education Standards, inquiry should
be the standard of professional science teaching practice in the United States,
“Inquiry into authentic questions generated from student experience is the central
strategy for teaching science.” (National Research Council, 1995, p. 31). These
standards clearly suggest that inquiry forms of teaching should play an important
if not central role in teacher educators’ work with preservice teachers. Yet, some
researchers and policy makers suggest that elementary teachers do not receive an
adequate preparation in the theory and practice of inquiry (Radford, 1998;
Rutherford & Ahlgren, 1990).
Although it can be argued that the job of science teacher educators is to
present preservice teachers with new frameworks, such as inquiry, for thinking
about teaching science, research points to important issues that must be addressed
if preservice teachers are expected to seriously consider new teaching practices.
Tabachnik & Zeichner (1984) argue that new perspectives on teaching tend to
conflict with the preservice teachers’ previous and dearly held conceptions of
teaching, and that the preservice teachers tend to maintain their old conceptions
rather than changing them. Likewise, teachers face a number of school related
constraints that make it difficult to implement new teaching strategies (Abell &
Roth, 1992; Duschl & Wright, 1989). Changing science teaching practices at any
point in a teaching career is a difficult and stressful process because teachers work
in complex social and intellectual environments that both enable and constrain
efforts to change (Brickhouse & Bodner, 1992; Tobin & Lamaster, 1995). Therefore,
a disservice is done to the efforts of preservice teachers if their struggles are defined
as an unwillingness or inability to adopt a new set of teaching skills. In looking at
the issue from another angle, it can be argued that new teaching practices, such as
inquiry, demand that preservice teachers engage in a much more difficult process of
reconceiving their roles and identities as teachers.
The research is quite clear that learning to teach is a difficult task that demands
intense intellectual engagement by individuals as they formulate new roles and
conceptions of self (Bullough, Knowles, & Crow; 1992; McDonald, 1992).
Consequently, conflicts and struggles permeate preservice teachers’ articulations
148
of their professional roles and identities as a particular kind of science teacher
(Helms, 1998). It is just such a conception of struggle that Bryan and Abell (1999)
highlight in their recent research on preservice teachers developing professional
knowledge. In their case study of a preservice teacher (Barbara), Bryan and Abell
describe her conflicts and struggles in developing her science teaching practice.
Bryan and Abell highlighted the struggles and conflicts that this woman engaged
with as she developed a personal vision of teaching practice.
Specifically, she learned that her practice was not consistent with her
vision of teaching elementary science. Barbara also learned that
modifying her practice to reflect her beliefs was difficult, thought-
intensive task. It was not easy for Barbara to confront and critique her
own teaching, especially during student teaching, when certainty, self
confidence, and time to reflect thoughtfully are rare commodities. (p.135)
Conflict and struggle were not roadblocks or problems to Barbara developing
her sense of good science teaching but the point at which intellectual engagement
and reflection were highlighted and foregrounded.
The struggle for science teachers to construct a particular kind of identity is
often articulated as a tension between competing versions of good teaching practice.
Usually these are combinations of personal visions, cultural expectations and ideas
gained from professional development. Volkmann & Anderson (2000) suggest that
the teacher in their study worked to negotiate the tensions between possible versions
of science teacher identity, such as the caring teacher who nurtures students and the
tough teacher who maintains control in the classroom. The struggles related to
resolving the tension in a meaningful way are the pathways by which preservice
and novice teachers come to grips with their emerging identities as teachers
(Goodfellow & Sumsion, 2000).
Teaching Roles Assumed in Inquiry Forms of Teaching
The struggle to construct an identity as a science teacher can be complicated
by the multifaceted nature of inquiry science teaching. Defining precisely what
inquiry teaching is and how it should proceed in the classroom is quite difficult
(Henson, 1986), and adds to the problem of specifying the role a teacher should
adopt in an inquiry form of teaching. For example, Bonnstetter (1998) suggests
that, historically, definitions of inquiry have ranged from what he calls “traditional
hands-on” to “student research.” Furthermore, inquiry is often conflated or used
interchangeably with other terms that describe similar teaching practices, such as
hands-on (Shymansky, Kyle & Alport 1982, Stohr –Hunt, 1996), generative teaching
practice (Flick, 1996), constructivism (Driver, & Oldham, 1986; Fensham, Gunstone
& White, 1995) and conceptual change (Posner, Strike, Gertzog & Hewson, 1982;
Smith, Blakeslee & Anderson, 1993). There are many differences in the kind of
science teaching and the roles that students and teachers take in the teaching and
learning process that might be expected within any one of these. Traditional hands-
MICHAEL T. HAYES
149
on teaching allows for a very teacher directed and controlled form of teaching,
whereas student research demands that the teacher acquire a less directed and more
hands-off role in the teaching process. Although Bonnstetter argues that science
teachers should be rearticulating their roles more in the direction of student research,
he considered the range of teaching practices to be inquiry. Given these diverse and
sometimes ambiguous articulations of the role of a teacher in inquiry science
teaching, uncovering a particular role for the teacher that is essential, required, or
most effective is an impossible task and can potential lead to some difficulty for
preservice teachers as they develop their identities and skills in inquiry science
teaching.
However, what seems to emerge from recent recommendations for elementary
science teaching is a rethinking of the teacher’s role from initiator and controller to
guide and facilitator (Loucks-Horsley, Kapitan, Carlson, Kuerbis, Clark, Nelle,
Sachse, & Walton, 1990). This means that the teacher is being asked to adopt a
strong role as a guide who focuses and challenges students as well as providing
opportunities for students to initiate and conduct their own investigations. The
National Science Education Standards, for example, present an image in which the
teacher acts as a critical decision maker who intervenes in the learning process at
appropriate times in an effort to encourage, challenge, and focus students:
Although open exploration is useful for students when they encounter
new materials and phenomena, teachers need to intervene to focus and
challenge students or the exploration might not lead to understanding.
Teachers also must decide when to challenge students to make sense of
their experiences. (NRC, 1995, pg. 36)
The National Science Education Standards articulate a vision of the teacher as
decision-maker negotiating a complex network of students, activity, and knowledge.
This vision ends up as more of a general set of ideas that can guide practice and not
a stipulation for what practice should look like.
With inquiry forms of teaching situated at the center of recommendations for
professional practice in science education, some have argued that it is imperative
for researchers to examine how preservice teachers develop a knowledge base and
practice of inquiry (Finley, Lawrenze & Heller, 1992). In this research I examined
how one class of elementary preservice teachers engaged in productive struggles to
understand and implement an inquiry teaching unit in their field-placement setting.
Methods
Participants in this study were enrolled in my elementary science methods
course. There were twenty-two students in the class and all of them agreed to
participate in the research. The students in the course (henceforth referred to as
preservice teachers) were in their third semester of a four-semester intensive field-
based teacher education program. At my university we offer a field-based teacher
education program in which students are organized into cohorts that take all of
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their coursework together over a two-year program. As well as my course, the
preservice teachers were concurrently enrolled in a math methods course and a
social foundations of education course. They were also responsible for ongoing
field experiences that entailed one full day per week of participation in an elementary
classroom.
This project relies primarily on the analysis of the written documents-reflective
journals and final project-produced by the preservice teachers as required for this
course. For their final project the preservice teachers implemented an inquiry with
their students in their field placement. The assignment was to keep a daily journal
of their experiences implementing their inquiry projects then produce a three to
five page summary of the project. Methods of qualitative data analysis were used to
organize the contents of these documents into descriptive categories (Miles &
Huberman, 1994) that were used to determine the themes and ideas around which
the preservice teachers organized their experiences. I also engaged in a reflective
strategy for analyzing and reconstructing events that occurred during class. To this
end, I kept a reflective journal (O’ Hanlon, 1997) of my experiences teaching this
class, in which I recount specific interactions and interpret their meanings. In each
step of the process, I was intimately involved in guiding the preservice teachers’
learning. Consequently, the ideas they chose to consider and how they talked
about them in their projects are tied to my expectations for the course and the kinds
of relationships we developed during the semester.
Results/Discussion
In this paper I focus specifically on the preservice teachers’ projects and how
they wrote about their attempts to implement inquiry in their field-placement
classrooms. Yet, a number of the issues with which they struggled during this project
were foreshadowed in the very beginning of the course. It is, therefore, worthwhile
to reflect upon those initial experiences because they help to situate the students’
struggles within the larger context of demands and expectations of this particular
class.
In my elementary science methods course, I focused on inquiry as a valuable
set of ideas that the preservice teachers could use to guide science teaching in the
elementary school. I presented inquiry, not as the only way to teach science in the
elementary school, but as a group of possible theories and practices that comprise
a significant portion of the professional standards for science teaching. I drew from
certain notions of inquiry teaching practices discussed in the National Science
Education Standards, which include: (a) guiding students in developing their own
questions to examine, (b) providing meaningful concrete experiences from which
such questions can be generated, (c) facilitating open-ended long-term student
investigations, and (d) fostering a community of learners who work cooperatively
in their investigations. Taken together an image of science teaching comes into
focus in which teachers act as guides who provide complex engaging experiences
for their students then encourage and challenge them to take responsibility for
their own learning by asking questions and constructing investigations to answer
MICHAEL T. HAYES
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those questions (Chiapetta, 1997).
I used three texts to develop this perspective on inquiry in the course, the
National Science Education Standards, What Children Bring to Light by Bonnie
Shapiro (1994), and Inquiry at the Window by Phyllis Whitin and David Whitin
(1997). The chronological order of the course consisted of two weeks devoted to
reading and discussing each of the texts. For the next four weeks, I engaged the
preservice teachers in a short inquiry on plants that served as a model for how I
might lead an inquiry on plants with a group of fourth-grade students. At the end of
each lesson, we participated in a discussion, in which I asked the preservice teachers
to use the ideas and concepts from the three books to make sense of and critique my
teaching. After the readings and the lesson modeling, the preservice teachers were
given four weeks to implement the major project for the class which consisted of
leading their students through an inquiry on any science oriented subject of their
choosing. For the final assignment I told the students that I expected to see a
thoughtful analysis of their experiences as well as a critical discussion of inquiry.
Most importantly, I made it clear that they were going to be held responsible for the
quality of their reflection and not their teaching proficiency. I wanted the preservice
teachers to feel comfortable taking risks as they experimented with a new teaching
method without fear that it would reflect harshly on their overall progress through
the program. For the final two weeks we reconvened in our classroom to discuss
their experiences with inquiry.
From the beginning of class the preservice teachers liked the idea of inquiry
especially as it allowed them to begin thinking of working with children to generate
ideas and questions that were germane to their experiences. The preservice teachers
showed the first signs of anxiety after reading the opening two chapters of Inquiry
at the Window. I began the first day by asking the preservice teachers to convene in
small groups to discuss the readings. After forty-five minutes of small group work,
I brought the groups together to discuss their reactions. After the first moments of
silence that typically follow such a request one of the outspoken students, Angela,
offered this insight, “We don’t want you to take this in the wrong way, but this
seems to be a totally unrealistic way to teach.” The rest of the class responded by
nodding their heads and I heard a few under the breath comments, “Yeah we thought
the same thing”, and, “good point.” In the discussion that followed the students
voiced concerns that such teaching, while exciting in an idealistic sort of way,
seemed unrealistic given the many constraints they were facing in the classroom.
They suggested that inquiry seemed to take up too much time during the day and
space in the curriculum, and were concerned that they would not be able to cover
the information in the State Performance Standards or in their classroom’s textbook.
They also worried about the possibility for discipline problems, exorbitant
preparation requirements, and their lack of knowledge in a particular topic.
These kinds of concerns are quite common for preservice and beginning
teachers (Bullough, Knowles & Crow, 1992; Flick, 1997). I was not particularly
uneasy with their concerns because this is a particular stage in their development as
teachers, and I knew that we would work though these issues for the entire semester.
But their level of anxiety and their almost constant critique posed a dilemma for
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me: the students were doing an excellent job of engaging with the text and
uncovering the basic assumptions about teaching and learning that guided the
authors’ work, something that I encourage in my classes, yet they were being so
critical that they were developing an attitude that inquiry was just too difficult for
them to manage. I reacted by voicing some concern even frustration in my journal.
I was hoping for a different reaction today. I like that they’re being
critical and I am excited at how well they have read and thought about
the ideas in the book, but they seem to be developing an attitude that
they’re almost afraid to try an inquiry.
From this point forward I spent time in almost every class period addressing
their concerns about the upcoming project. Our discussions of their projects
consistently focused on two issues: how to adequately define inquiry and clarifying
their roles as teachers in inquiry teaching. Throughout the readings, discussions,
and my modeling the students’ concerns remained, and I became apprehensive
with how they would engage in their inquiry projects.
When the course requirements shifted from reading and discussion to
implementation of the project it was clear that the struggle and its concomitant
anxiety were just beginning. Particularly with the preservice teachers’ initial
experiences, I could not find anything hopeful in their struggles. Their initial
verbal reports to me indicated that they were having terrible difficulty implementing
their project. The preservice teachers’ concerns ranged from too much time required
to plan to difficulties maintaining control of the students during open explorations.
As the preservice teachers began turning in the first pages of their reflective journals,
the verbal reports I had been receiving were confirmed. Particularly at the beginning,
many of the students expressed deep concerns and apprehensions about beginning
the project,
Inquiry wasn’t something that I was familiar with and to be totally honest,
I wasn’t thrilled to do this project in my classroom. (Jannica, journal)
Today was the first day of our nature inquiry. I must admit I was quite
apprehensive going into inquiry and I was skeptical that I could pull off
such teaching or that it would be beneficial for my students. (Lisa, journal)
While at least one student was overtly resistant:
I am definitely not looking forward to this project and wish I did not have
to do it. (Sheila, Journal)
As the preservice teachers moved to putting their projects into practice, it was
clear that they struggled with all of the things that preservice teachers struggle
with, such as planning and maintaining control over student behavior, as well as
the assumptions particular to inquiry. Yet it was, to my relief, not an unproductive
MICHAEL T. HAYES
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struggle. But because I was immersed in their trials and tribulations from the
beginning of the course, all I saw were struggles in the form of problems. It was not
until after I had received and read the final version of their projects, that I came to
see their struggles in a different light.
Drawing from the comments that the preservice teachers made in their journals
and project summaries, I suggest that it was the struggle through which they came
to define and truly understand the nature of this teaching practice. Their struggles,
therefore, were with making sense of and defining the terms of inquiry. But it was
about more than defining and making sense, most importantly it was about making
this form of teaching their own.
Struggling to Define the Parameters of Inquiry
Inquiry is not a singular mode of instruction that can be defined by a specific
and well-defined set of characteristics or skills (Bonnstetter, 1998). So, when I say
that the preservice teachers struggled with the internal assumptions of inquiry it is
not to suggest that these were somehow inherent in inquiry forms of teaching. It
was in their practices, or, more appropriately, their struggles to define and implement
inquiry oriented practices , that the preservice teachers began constructing the
terms and conditions of inquiry. Throughout their classroom experiences and their
inquiry projects, the preservice teachers struggled with and defined three categories
of meaning around which an inquiry approach to teaching was to be articulated:
letting go, going with students’ interests, and asking the right questions. These are
what Spradley (1980) refers to as “folk categories” that are situated in the everyday
language used by research participants as they negotiate their lives in bounded
cultural settings. The terms that I have applied to these particular categories of
meaning were used at various times by some of the preservice teachers, and I do not
want to imply that they all used the same term to describe the same sets of ideas or
practices. My intent is to appropriate some of the preservice teachers’ language to
describe a general set of practices and ideas that I observed in their projects. I do not
conceptualize these as three separate and distinct categories because each is closely
linked and overlaps in the students’ work. Furthermore, the first category, letting
go, is actually a broad heading under which going with students’ interests and
asking the right questions fit within.
Letting Go
The preservice teachers exhibited more anxiety and struggle over the notion
of letting go than any other part of their projects. The general tendency discussed
in their journals and summaries was to consider that they had to let go of the
teacher’s authority to control and direct student engagement with the curriculum:
In some ways, inquiry is a process of letting go for the teacher. I’m not
sure it’s for everyone though. I know many teachers that I’m not sure
would be comfortable with letting go of their control of the curriculum
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and the classroom. (Lisa, summary)
The primary problem I had was the power and control that I exerted on
the students. I believe that I had trouble letting go so that the kids had
more space to ask questions and study what they wanted to study. (Marie,
journal)
When the preservice teachers began discussing the decisions they made during
their teaching, they focused on different ways in which they negotiated their control
and authority. For James the struggle was with how he negotiated the relationship
between the curriculum and his students, “I wanted to let those activities happen
without “telling” the students how to do it, then the information that we studied
could come from those explorations. This was very hard for me and for some of the
students as well” (James, summary). James wanted his students to have some control
in deciding which activities they would do and the ideas or information would
emerge from these activities. Lori, on the other hand, was concerned with what she
perceived was the lack of preplanning that went into inquiry, “I was not sure what
to do about inquiry. I was extremely uncomfortable not having each one of my
lessons prethought out and all the materials and supplies in hand before I started
the project” (Lori, journal). I do not want to give the impression that Lori did not
plan, because her journal is full of descriptions of how she planned her lessons. The
idea of going with students’ interests meant, for Lori, that she could not devise
definitive long-term plans:
I’m frustrated that I can’t plan this whole thing out. My mentor teacher
wants plans way ahead of time, and I want to know what to do more than
one lesson in advance. Trying to go with what students want to do is a
real problem when it comes to planning. (Lori, journal)
James’s and Lori’s struggle to let go were about defining teaching practices that
shifted some of the responsibility for the science curriculum from their hands as
teachers and situating it in the needs and interests of their students.
Although the idea of letting go posed a number of difficulties for the preservice
teachers the struggle was not only about trying to let go but using the notion of
letting go as a tool for examining their roles as teachers.
My inquiry project was similar to the ride Space Mountain at Disneyland.
Although I felt like we were in the dark most of the time, there were some
high points along with the low points. My main struggle was that I felt
like I was determining the entire ride of inquiry. My understanding is
that in inquiry the teacher is merely a guide for the children, but my
students needed more assistance than a guide. Overall we learned lots of
facts about the greenery around us, but there were so many other things
that could have been investigated if only I could have let go a little more
then I could have really done a good inquiry. (Kim, summary)
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For Kim, letting go was essential to conceiving of her role as a guide in inquiry
teaching. This entailed that she not determine all aspects of the inquiry, yet she
realized that her students required more teacher guidance than she thought was
appropriate for inquiry. In her journal entries and summary, Kim does not specifically
define what a guide is or what this role would look like in her practice, but letting
go allowed her to begin questioning her role as a teacher by comparing an abstract
ideal (letting go) with the reality she encountered (students needed more assistance).
Kim felt that being a guide required a level of letting go that she did not achieve in
this particular project, which, in turn, defines the possibility for her future struggles
to become the kind of teacher she values: If she wants to achieve her vision of what
a guide looks like in inquiry science teaching she needed to let go to a greater
extent.
The struggles that the preservice teachers defined as letting go were concerned
with establishing a form of teacher control and authority in the classroom that was
new to them. Mostly it was articulated as a move to decenter their roles and provide
students a greater voice in curriculum-making decisions. Letting go is never a well-
articulated idea but a vague notion that stands in for the general concerns involved
as they worked to decenter their roles in the teaching relationship. No matter how
vague letting go might be defined in their analyses, the particular label acts a
concrete concept that can be juxtaposed against control and authority. The conflict
that emerged from the juxtaposition of letting go with teaching practices that
highlighted control and authority is central to how the preservice teachers made
sense of their teaching practice. Letting go is also a notion that gets rearticulated
into other concerns that were central to the preservice teachers’ struggles with
inquiry.
Going with Students’ Interests
Going with student’s interests was a very specific concern of the preservice
teachers that emerged on the first day we discussed Inquiry at the Window. In our
initial discussions the preservice teachers pointed out that the authors of Inquiry at
the Window tend to construct the role of the teacher in a way that makes it seem as
if the teacher effortlessly identified the needs and interests of a student or group of
students then instantly adjusted the direction or focus of the curriculum. In their
book, the Whitins describe a number of their interactions with students from a
distanced third-person stance. The effect of establishing this position in their
written narrative is that it appeared to remove the authors from the pedagogical
picture suggesting that students effortlessly made exceptionally complex decisions
with virtually no teacher intervention.
As the activity of the bluebirds continued the children wanted to keep
track of other pieces of data. They wondered what the female was actually
doing inside the box, so they began to track the amount of time she spent
in the box. (1997, pg. 74)
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This makes it appear as if there were no articulated curriculum, no planning,
no decision making; it was a free-flowing effortless experience. Certainly, the
Whitins make a good deal of the need for planning and pre-thinking, but students
referred to passages such as this, that are peppered throughout the text, to construct
and become anxious about what it means to go with students’ interests. The preservice
teachers in my class, however, were learning first hand that such experiences are far
from effortless.
Over the course of the inquiry I found that the biggest chance or risk I
had to take as a teacher was to relax and allow the students to lead the
curriculum. I felt that I had to come to class prepared with integrated
activities. I was very concerned about “filling the time” constructively
and worried that the children would muck around and not be able to
connect their muck to anything. The more worried I became about having
tangible evidence that the children were learning, the more control I
took over the curriculum. I had to ask myself, was this an inquiry? (Jennifer,
summary)
Jennifer articulates her primary concern here as “allowing the students to lead
the curriculum.” She struggles with finding ways to provide her students with
opportunities to lead the curriculum then discovers that as she tries to put this into
practice, the students appear to cross the line into undirected “mucking around.”
Jennifer is concerned that going with students’ interests relocates the power
relationship too much with the child’s experiences, needs, and interests. This concern
leads Jennifer to critically assess her teaching, and she decides that she has a problem
with “taking control of the curriculum.” For Jennifer this means, “I just started
telling them what we were going to study and just decided on my own what kinds
of activities to do and giving them assignments without listening to what they were
interested in” (Jennifer, summary). She feels that asserting this control violated a
basic premise of inquiry, which is going with the students’ interests.
Sandra, on the other hand, articulated the issue in almost exactly the opposite
fashion.
As a teacher trying to go with the children’s interests is not always the
easiest thing to do. There are so many decisions about what direction to
take, where to go and there is so much planning involved, getting the
right experiments for them to do and getting the materials together and
organized is such a headache. (Sandra, summary)
For Sandra, going with students’ interests was difficult because of the wide
range of decisions to be made and possible directions to pursue. The focus of her
anxiety is exactly the opposite of Jennifer’s. While Jennifer was concerned that she
was spending too much effort in organizing and controlling the curriculum, Sandra
was concerned that she was not devoting enough time and energy to organizing
and controlling. Asserting control through planning and organization, then, was
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Sandra’s solution to the problem of going with students’ interests, whereas for
Jennifer it was the problem.
Going with students’ interests was a struggle for the preservice teachers to
decenter their roles as teachers. They struggled with divesting themselves of some
of the control and authority over the curriculum and providing their students more
opportunity to define the content and direction. The struggles were not necessarily
in the same direction, as in Sandra’s and Jennifer’s cases, the source of struggle may
have been the same but the focus of the struggle was entirely different. Some of the
preservice teachers worked to exert more control over the curriculum while others
felt that control was exactly the problem. In either case going with students’ interests
defined the terms of engagement for the preservice teachers as they worked to
reconsider their roles as teachers in an inquiry approach to science teaching.
Asking the Right Questions
Letting go and going with students’ interests are vague ideas that address the
role of the teacher in inquiry in a very broad and general sense. Asking the right
questions focuses attention on a specific skill that is used in support of inquiry and
is a term used by a few of the preservice teachers to describe a concern for the role
the teacher should play in the question asking aspect of inquiry science teaching.
As with letting go and going with students’ interests, the concern involved the role
of the teacher in supporting student autonomy in the learning process.
Inquiry can be frustrating especially trying to get the kids to ask questions.
I found myself giving children the answers to their questions because I
had a hard time getting them to think why something happens or why
something is the way it is. I wasn’t sure the students were learning what
they were supposed to learn or if they were learning at all. (Sean, journal)
When Sean began his inquiry project, he felt that question asking in an inquiry
approach to teaching required that he not give students answers to their questions.
Yet this was a difficult role for Sean to play and he became increasingly concerned
that by not giving them answers the students would not be learning. Later in his
journal, Sean comes to terms with his role by suggesting that it’s not about whether
he could or should give students answers to their questions but that the problem
came in deciding when this was appropriate.
I think I found out that I can give students answers to some of their
questions but I have to decide when this will help to keep them from
getting frustrated and stopping their investigation. Because having some
information given to them helps to give them ideas of what to think about
and were they can go to get more information. (Sean, journal)
Sean’s struggle came as he worked to change his initial and absolute view of
the teacher as not providing answers to any of the students’ questions to a position
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in which he had to make constant decisions about when it was appropriate to give
answers. Sean did more than just find a happy medium between question poser and
answer giver. Instead, he articulated a new position as a critical decision maker
when it came to addressing children and their questions.
Kahea presented a different set of concerns about her role in the question
asking process. Kahea felt that her students’ questions did not necessarily have to
end with some sort of answer but this perspective was countered by an anxiety that
students ask questions she could answer. She was more interested in helping her
students to devise and answer their own questions.
Also inquiry is based on the students’ questions and wonders and how
these questions and wonders are organized to produce possible answers.
Their questions didn’t have to end with answers, which I (subconsciously)
was concerned with. The problem was that I needed to know what
direction we were going and how to take them there. I simply wanted the
students to ask questions that I could answer. (Kahea, summary)
Kahea was articulating her role in inquiry as a guide that helped students to
ask questions that were meaningful and opened avenues for investigation. Her
struggle was with finding ways to articulate a position in which she could encourage
and support students to ask these kinds of questions.
In the end I think I failed. The students were filled with questions and
wonders waiting to be unleashed, and I see that I need to help guide the
students to unleash these questions rather than being so concerned with
being in control. If I had stopped to really think about the meaning of
inquiry I would have realized that the students could inquire and ask
questions about anything. (Kahea, summary)
Kahea had this notion that her students were naturally predisposed to asking
questions. Her concern was not with helping students to generate questions or, as in
Sean’s case, determining when it was appropriate to give answers to student
questions, but in figuring out how to “guide” students to “unleash” their questions.
Kahea is imbuing her students with considerable power in the context of question
asking and decentering her position as an authority
It is clear that the preservice teachers were troubled with particular aspects of
inquiry, and they struggled with defining and putting into practice the teacher’s
role. Their struggles were not only in the sense that it made inquiry difficult or a
problem to implement, although these kinds of struggles were evident. The struggle
allowed them to begin defining for themselves the critical components of inquiry
and what it would mean for their practice. Indeed, it was through their struggles that
the preservice teachers began defining the nature of inquiry as well as their roles as
teachers. Each of the three primary concerns that I articulated in the above sections:
letting go, going with the students’ interests, and asking the right questions were
articulated as issues involving the preservice teachers’ developing identities as
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teachers. The preservice teachers’ struggles were with articulating a vision of science
teaching that was in many ways at odds with the identity of teacher they had
developed from various experiences before entering my class.
If the preservice teachers’ struggles were only about making sense of inquiry
teaching or in trying to attain some proficiency in a particular set of teaching skills
then the struggle would be superfluous to their overall endeavors. It might be
expected that their struggles would be more about problems or blockades associated
with implementation (Abell & Roth, 1992). But, as I argue, this was not the case.
The preservice teachers were struggling with defining the very terms of inquiry and
their roles in this form of teaching practice. In fact, they were struggling against
certain assumptions of teaching as much as they were struggling for another set of
assumptions. In these struggles the preservice teachers were acting in relationship
to the social and cultural assumptions of teaching. In particular, they were acting
with respect to traditional conceptions of teacher authority and control over the
curriculum that dominates or is even expected in modern school practices (McNeil,
1986). The idea of the in-control, well-planned teacher is part of the cultural text of
teaching that is generated from various and disparate parts of the cultural milieu,
such as personal experience, popular culture, and mass media (Weber & Mitchell,
1995). Inquiry need not entail notions of letting go, or going with students’ interests
but letting go appears as a reasonable strategy to preservice teachers who are
struggling against the social and cultural constitution of teaching practices that
emphasize ownership and control.
In short, the preservice teachers struggled in various ways as they worked to
implement an inquiry form of science teaching. A key point I wish to make is that
the preservice teachers did not conceive of their struggles as a barrier to the
implementation of inquiry. They thought of their struggles pragmatically, that this
was a new form of teaching for them and they were experimenting then determining
what went well and what was problematic. As I mentioned in the introduction, this
was my intent as the course instructor. I wanted the students to feel that they could
experiment without fear that I was holding them accountable to a preconceived
notion of good inquiry teaching. With that constraint diminished, the students
seemed more willing to extend what they felt were their current capabilities and
experiment with a new way of thinking about teaching that involved questioning
how they planned and organized the science curriculum and managed the complex
relationship between themselves, science knowledge, and their students.
Assessing the Experience with Inquiry Science Teaching
The preservice teachers also took the time to reflect on their projects and
provide a self evaluation of inquiry teaching and their ability to implement it in
their classrooms. Most of the preservice teachers were disappointed with their ability
to implement inquiry and wondered whether they had actually done an inquiry.
The students simply needed to be guided in the right direction, and there
the problem lies. I needed to know what direction the students were
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160
going to and how to take them there. I simply wanted the students to ask
questions I could answer, but inquiry doesn’t always have such answers,
and I wanted a single focus which I could prepare for. I should have a
chance to explore their interests instead I went with my interests, plants
something I was comfortable teaching. Knowing was a comfort zone for
me and through this inquiry I found that I have a difficult time stepping
outside of my comfort zone. (Allison, summary)
In the final instance, I found that because these preservice teachers took this
project as an opportunity to engage in a form of science teaching that troubled their
assumed or taken for granted roles as teachers, their struggles were concerned with
constructing a form of teaching that was meaningful, useful and of value to them. They
did not simply attempt to implement a preconceived model of teaching or a set of
skills, rather, they found ways to articulate their own personal ideas, notions, and
values of teaching with the kind of teaching we discussed during class.
What has emerged as my objective over the past three weeks has been a
combination of what I think is important to learn and what the children
are interested in. They have been fascinated with insects from the moment
we found the ootheca. I’ve been trying to get them interested in plants
because this topic offered the specimen variety available at our field
site. Although the plants have been engaging we keep ending back with
the insects. To somehow bring this all together I am hoping to connect
the two-show how one is dependent on the other. (Carolyn, journal)
The struggle is evident in the solution: Carolyn does not present this as a
confident resolution to the problem of letting go or going with the students’ interests,
it is stated more as a pragmatically sutured and temporary settlement of the issue. In
the end, I was reasonably assured that the preservice teachers in my class engaged
in a productive struggle to make sense of a new type of teaching role. One student
eloquently summarizes the sense of struggle and learning, frustration and enjoyment,
I have attempted to portray throughout this paper.
In general I feel that I failed, but this inquiry was fun and a true learning
experience. The students learned about plants, what plants need to survive
(sun, water, food) and what plants are used for. I learned that all the high
expectations you have as a teacher for your students don’t mean a thing
if you can’t listen to your students find what they are interested in learning
then organizing information and ideas in a coherent manner for them. I
had such grand plans, but many of them never materialized, and I blame
that on myself not on the students’ lack of curiosity and questioning. As
a teacher I need to be able to bring together many different ideas, wonder
experiences and resources to make the subject understandable and
enjoyable to the students. In this area I feel I have failed. But it provides
me with something to strive for. I’ll be forced to step out of my comfort
MICHAEL T. HAYES
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zone of planning in order to accomplish this, but by doing so maybe I’ll
also learn how to let my students take the helm. I don’t always have to be
the captain of the ship of learning. (Kahea, summary)
Conclusion
In the elementary science methods course I taught, the preservice teachers
wrote about the struggles they faced trying to implement an inquiry approach to
teaching. In particular they were concerned with the problems associated with their
emerging identities and roles as new teachers. The type of inquiry teaching that
was discussed in this class made many of the students anxious and ill at ease with
taking themselves out of an authoritarian role in the classroom and working towards
a position that afforded them an opportunity to work with students and develop
their interests. Reconfiguring their roles in this manner forced the preservice teachers
into an uncomfortable position, and they struggled to construct categories of
meaning for their teaching practice, that I argue were articulated around three
notions: (a) letting go, (b) going with students’ interests, and (c) asking the right
questions. These categories of meaning represent the preservice teachers’ provisional
solutions to the problematic posed by struggling with their role in inquiry teaching.
Most importantly, the categories resulted from a struggle that was initiated as the
preservice teachers were placed into an uncomfortable and unsure position.
I argue that the exploration of a theory and practice of inquiry science teaching
served a decentering function for the preservice teachers. By decentering I am
referring to a process through which the preservice teachers were moved into an
unsure and ambiguous place: From an identity as a teacher that is safe, sure, and
comfortable to an identity that is unsettled, uncertain, and uncomfortable. It is true
that preservice teachers, no matter the class they are taking or ideas they are learning,
struggle with developing identities as teachers. Too often the literature on learning
to teach science from an inquiry perspective foregrounds effectiveness and the
concern of researchers and policy makers is in how well the preservice teacher
learns to teach in an inquiry fashion. Documents such as the NationalScience
Education Standards and the National Science Teacher Educator Standards focus
attention on the skills and concepts required for teaching inquiry. Teaching cannot
be reduced to a set of skills that can be mastered and evaluated (Bartholome, 1993)
and it is clear that becoming a teacher and learning to teach is a difficult process.
Britzman (1991) further argues that the emphasis on effectiveness masks the very
problematic, complicated and ambiguous nature of teaching.
As I reflect on this process, I feel that there are two important implications for
teacher educators as they work with preservice teachers on inquiry forms of science
teaching. First is a heightened focus on the formation of an identity as a particular
kind of teacher rather than on developing skills that can be implemented. In the
preservice teachers’ reflections on their learning of inquiry and their teaching projects
they referred most often to their roles as teachers and not to the specific skills they
were using or developing. Even when discussing particular skills, such as going
with the students’ interests, they talked about how this particular skill was situated
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within their identity. By using the term decentering I am shifting the focus of
developing inquiry forms of science teaching away from the successful
implementation of a set of skills to the articulation of an identity as a particular
kind of teacher. Decentering, then, is a process of unsettling an identity in an effort
to constitute a change in the way the preservice teacher views themselves as a
particular kind of teacher. The unsettling happens because preservice teachers and
beginning teachers in this phase of their development are overwhelmingly
concerned with establishing authority through direct modes of classroom
management (Bullough, 1989). With these concerns at the forefront of their
identities as teachers some of the basic assumptions of inquiry, such as the teacher
as guide and facilitator became problematic and unsettling. On the other hand,
while inquiry served the decentering function it also gave the preservice teachers
an option for recentering and building a new and different identity. While inquiry
teaching was a stressful experience, it gave the preservice teachers a set of possibilities
to consider and work through.
The second critical insight I take from this project is the centrality of struggle
as elementary preservice teachers learn to teach science. As I worked with the
students and analyzed their writing, I came to view their struggles as a positive
process of building and movement by confronting very difficult ideas and issues.
This is a different sense of the word than how it is commonly used to describe a
problem that is encountered in the process of learning. It was a struggle to define
the unfamiliar terms of inquiry teaching and making this form of teaching their
own. This meant more than learning to be competent with a specific set of skills it
was about struggling to make sense of their roles and identities as teachers (Volkman
& Anderson, 1998). The preservice teachers articulated the struggle as a tension
between teacher centric versions of control and authority and visions of student
centric autonomy and freedom. This tension forced the preservice teachers to
consider alternatives to teaching practice then make decisions based on their
classroom experience. The kind of inquiry science teaching we studied in class was
an unsettling point that allowed the preservice teachers to begin asking questions
about their roles as a teachers; about the kind of teacher they would like to be rather
than how they would implement certain teaching skills.
Through their struggles to implement and define an inquiry approach to
teaching science, the preservice teachers were working towards articulating their
roles and identities as teachers. The preservice teachers indicated that their struggles
were worthwhile because they felt they were stretched in their capabilities as
teachers, and they were rewarded with a vision of a new and valuable perspective
on teaching. As their cohort leader and supervisor, I saw the value of their struggles
because it was there that they began to create new visions of themselves as teachers.
Furthermore, I was impressed with the level of critical reflection, honesty, and
thoughtfulness in their journal entries and project summaries. I might suggest that
when the prospective teacher is decentered and placed into a zone of discomfort,
they are forced to analyze their situation and carefully consider their role as a
teacher and what they expect from their students.
The inquiry approach to teaching served the decentering purpose. Certainly,
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I value an inquiry approach to teaching, it is why I focus on inquiry in my methods
classes. Yet, I have come to the conclusion that one of the primary outcomes
associated with having the preservice teachers consider inquiry teaching is that it
decenters their identity as teachers, but then gives them a set of possibilities to
grasp and achieve some sort of balance. Decentering is a difficult task particularly
since preservice teachers are new to the teaching game, and they are desperately
trying to feel comfortable and confident with a large group of children. They will
always be faced with teaching alternatives and forced to make decisions about
them. Learning to deal with this ambiguity and make reasonable decisions is
central to becoming a competent teacher. So, rather than simply holding inquiry as
the valued form of science teaching, teachers need to learn that inquiry serves a
dual function as a decentering device and as possible alternative in a world of
alternatives.
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