A Workshop Approach to Developing the Professional Pedagogical Vision of Irish Secondary Preservice Science Teachers

ABSTRACT

This article reports on an investigation of a workshop approach to probe and deepen Irish preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) initial professional pedagogical vision of inquiry-based science education (IBSE). In an effort to understand the experiential and historical foundation of their vision, we report on the current culture of science teaching and assessment within the Irish school system and contrast it with the aims set out at a policy level as a way of contextualizing teacher candidates’ ideas about IBSE. We describe a workshop approach designed to engage PSTs in IBSE activities and an analysis framework that allows us to elicit the PSTs’ professional pedagogical vision, specifically the key practices of coding and highlighting, from critiques of inquiry activities they carried out in the workshop. We offer the workshop approach as a viable complement to video analysis of exemplary teaching episodes and demonstrate the analytical power of the approach by reporting what practices the PSTs highlighted as constituting IBSE and how they coded the purpose of the practices they highlighted. We use these highlighted practices and coded purposes as indicators of their professional pedagogical vision of IBSE, and reveal the extent to which PSTs adapt the tenets of IBSE to fit in with their desire for students to remember science facts.

KEYWORDS:

• inquiry-based science education
• science teacher preparation
• professional vision
• preservice teachers

Notes

¹ In the United States, the most recent reform is the call for engaging students in science and engineering practices articulated in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013). We note that the definition of inquiry by Linn et al. (2004) aligns well with the NGSS practices.

² We describe the school system for the period in which the research was conducted.

³ We use the term status quo to represent typical pedagogical practices in schools, recognizing that the term necessarily covers a diverse group of practices; however, they are typically qualitatively different to teaching practices grounded in IBSE.

⁴ In this section, to avoid confusion between multiple meanings of code, we use the word code to refer to the meaning in Goodwin’s (1994) professional vision framework; that is, how the PSTs interpreted salient parts of the activity in regard to IBSE. For the analytical coding done of the PSTs’ critiques and interviews by the research group, we use the term analysis or analyze in place of the word code, recognizing this is not a perfect synonym.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute of International Education's Fulbright Scholars Program.