Chapter 9: Science teacher education and science as inquiry: promises and dilemmas

Teaching science as inquiry and presenting science learning as the practices of scientists have been touted as authentic means of teaching science in schools. However, this highly promising form of science teaching has been found to be problematic due to teachers’ lack of content knowledge in science (Howitt, 2007; Palmer, 2006) and generalist teachers teaching other subject matter (Kim & Tan, 2011). This difficulty in teaching elementary science is compounded by the need to teach science as inquiry. The difficulties of enacting scientific inquiry in schools (both elementary as well as secondary schools) have been well documented (Minstrell & van Zee, 2000; Windschitl, 2003) and research still has not provided a clear picture as to how scientific inquiry can be carried out (Anderson, 2002). Images such as students raising questions about science, carrying out scientific investigations to collect evidence, formulating scientific explanations based on the evidence that they collected, and reporting their findings to their peers (NRC, 2000) are at best a mirage for teachers who have not practiced science as part of their own education. Indeed, science teachers need to have had experience with scientific inquiry to be able to teach science this way. Crawford (2000) argues that teachers need to have had personal experience with scientific inquiry and be able to apply that experience to guiding students to work with and make sense of data while conducting scientific inquiry in the classroom.