Tapir Academic Press (Publisher)

Description

Inquiry has to do with what is defined as knowledge. Before the process of inquiry is put into motion, there are already some prefigurations of knowledge, in other words, students have some prior knowledge based on their being-in-the-world. Being aware of various epistemological presuppositions guiding the inquiry process is necessary if we want to be clear about why inquiry is such an important part of science teaching and learning processes. In the S-Team project, there are examples of many different ways of dealing with inquiry in teaching and learning processes. Inquiry in science teaching currently presupposes a curious, exploring, knowledge-seeking student, where the flexibility of the teacher is challenged in order to meet and stimulate the growing potential and insight gained by the student. In many cases, however, we cannot take student curiosity or knowledge seeking for granted, and inquiry has to begin at a more basic level of encouraging questioning and responsibility for one’s own learning. This calls for new and innovative teaching methods, described and discussed in depth by those involved in science teaching and teacher education together with researchers in the field, in order to tease out and discuss what works for who and in what context. What we interpret as inquiry within the science community, and across different national settings is part of what we want to address with this book. Defining inquiry as a process leads us to notions of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) or rather in the S-team context, communities of inquiry. Creation and implementation of learning environments where inquiry is the state of the art in science teaching and teacher training will influence the whole process of teaching and learning. Discussing the different aspects of these communities, what they represent and what it takes to create them and uphold them represent another topic we want to address in this anthology. Implementing Inquiry based methods in science teaching also calls for ways of evaluating this approach in science teaching. There are at least two aspects to this; firstly that teachers using IBSTE needs proper resources to help them make sound evaluations, and secondly, that any evaluation method reflects the whole teaching and learning process undertaken. Therefore articles related to this are of great value.

Period	Oct 2011 → Jun 2012