The place of the laboratory in secondary science teaching

The paper is based on interviews conducted with secondary science teachers in schools in England. It focuses on how teachers understand the place of the laboratory and laboratory work in their practice. It emphasizes, however, not the epistemological dimensions of their view but rather the following issues: how they construe their practice tactically in terms of ‘theory’ and ‘practical work’; how they use this construal in their judgements of lessons, in lesson planning and in relationships with pupils; and how laboratory work influences their institutional and material situation. It concludes with an analysis of the senses in which science teachers' work can be said to be ‘structured’ by its engagement with the laboratory, drawing on the work of the sociologist Anthony Giddens on the relationship between structure and agency.