Wayne Melville

Experience and Reflection: Preservice Science Teachers’ Capacity for Teaching Inquiry

In this article, we investigate the relationship between preservice teachers’ inquiry experience and their capacity to reflect on the challenges involved in implementing inquiry into classrooms. For data, we draw on the personal narratives of preservice science teachers enrolled in science instruction courses. Preservice teachers with extensive inquiry experiences perceive implementation challenges principally in terms of teaching and student learning. This contrasts with the perceptions of preservice teachers with limited inquiry experience for whom the main concerns relate to the negative perceptions of others, time, the curriculum, and materials. By identifying these perceptions, it may be possible to develop courses that assist limited and moderate-experience preservice teachers’ move toward the perceptions of their more inquiry experienced colleagues.

The Problematic Nature of the Practicum: A Key Determinant of Pre-service Teachers’ Emerging Inquiry-Based Science Practices

This article disseminates findings from a multi-year study regarding secondary preservice science teachers’ perceptions toward inquiry-based science teaching, and the extent these perceptions are augmented by their practicum. While findings indicated that preservice teachers did improve their understanding and capability of using scientific inquiry due to their methods course, the role of practicum in supporting their newly developed perceptions was problematic. Issues ranging from associate teacher subjugation, availability of resources, time constraints, and the need to address curriculum standards were the most commonly cited reasons for preservice teachers’ difficulty in creating an inquiry-based environment during their practicum. Implications are presented highlighting the importance of practicum experiences as a key determinant of pre-service science teachers’ emerging inquiry-based science views and practices.

Mentoring and Community: Inquiry as stance and science as inquiry

In this article, we investigate how mentoring relationships founded on inquiry as stance can work to emphasize the conditions that promote the development of teachers of science as inquiry. Drawing on data collected through semi‐structured interviews, we have developed two narrative case studies based on the two mentoring relationships that exist between three teachers: Will, Dan, and Cathy. Will entered the teaching profession in 1966, and has acted as a mentor for Dan since he commenced teaching in 1982. Similarly, Dan has mentored Cathy since she commenced teaching in 1999. By following two generations of mentoring relationships, we have gained insights into the potential for inquiry as stance to assist the promotion of the professional development standards of the National Science Education Standards. Our data and analysis clearly point to the need for mentoring relationships to exist within larger inquiry‐based communities if they are to produce rapid and sustained changes to teacher practice.

Science teacher development through collaborative action research

This article explores the views and actions of four science teachers participating in a collaborative action research project. A qualitative case study approach was used to describe and analyze the development of these teachers. This development initially involved the teachers critically comparing their extant practices to current developments in science curriculum, teaching and learning. From this iterative and reflective process, the teachers proceeded to implement curricular changes and reflect again on their modified curricular practices. The authors’ analysis of the data suggests that all participants had augmented their personal understanding of both scientific inquiry and the nature of science, and had also developed socially and professionally. Implications for the value of collaborative action research in promoting teacher development are presented.

Bourdieu, Department Chairs and the Reform of Science Education

Using the insights of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, this article considers the role of the science department chair in the reform of school science education. Using Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ of ‘field’, ‘habitus’ and ‘capital’, we case study the work of two teachers who both actively pursue the teaching and learning of science as inquiry. One teacher, Dan, has been a department chair since 2000, and has actively encouraged his department to embrace science as inquiry. The other teacher, Leslie, worked for one year in Dan’s department before being transferred to another school where science teaching continues to be more traditional. Our work suggests that there are three crucial considerations for chairs seeking to lead the reform of science teaching within their department. The first of these is the development of a reform-minded habitus, as this appears to be foundational to the capital that can be expended in the leadership of reform. The second is an understanding of how to wield power and position in the promotion of reform. The third is the capacity to operate simultaneously and strategically within, and across, two fields; the departmental field and the larger science education field. This involves downplaying administrative logics, and foregrounding more inquiry-focused logics as a vehicle to challenge traditional science-teaching dispositions—the latter being typically dominated by concerns about curriculum ‘coverage’.

Workplace as Community: Perspectives on Science Teachers Professional Learning

This study explores teacher professional learning within the workplace context of a science department community. Workplace learning is considered in terms of the construction and flow of information about science, pedagogy and the relationships of science to the wider community. Implications for establishing sound conditions for teacher workplace learning are also considered, particularly the importance of trust.

Distributed leadership with the aim of ‘reculturing’: a departmental case study

This article considers a secondary science department that has, since 2000, developed distributed leadership as a form of human capacity building. Using a longitudinal ethnographic case study allowed us to consider how distributed leadership can be nurtured and developed in a department. Our analysis centres on two key issues: the nature and pattern of distributed leadership practices and the continuity that provides coherence to those practices. From our analysis, there appear to be two major conclusions. The first of these is the need for administrators to be purposeful in the appointments that they make to formal leadership positions. To enact distributed leadership practices requires leaders who can exercise both formal power and influence. The second conclusion relates to the time required for continuity of leadership practices to give rise to changes that lead to teachers managing the teaching and learning programme.

Uncertainty and the Reform of Elementary Math Education

This paper investigates the notion of uncertainty as elementary teachers engage in conversations intended to develop their understanding and implementation of reform-based mathematics teaching. Using a narrative methodology, several sources of teacher uncertainty are investigated: teaching and learning, the subject, and improving one’s own teaching. The data analysis indicates two important findings. The first is the importance of substantive and syntactic subject knowledge as a necessary foundation for teachers to understand uncertainty in terms that renew their classroom practice. The second is the need to develop and sustain communities in which teachers value opportunities to critique their classroom practices.

Contesting continuing professional development: reflections from England

This paper argues the competing ways in which continuing professional development (CPD) is currently practised in schooling settings in England is a product of the complex social conditions within which teachers work and learn, and teachers’ efforts to make sense of these conditions. Specifically, the paper draws upon research into the teacher learning practices, and conditions of practice, of a group of 18 teachers from one inner-city comprehensive secondary school in the British Midlands. To make sense of competing approaches to CPD within the school, the paper analyses these teachers’ experiences in light of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social practices as contested. The research reveals competing approaches to teacher CPD in relation to the management of teachers’ CPD, the focus upon improving test scores and the modes of learning in which teachers participate. The paper shows how conflicting pressures and demands in the context within which teachers work, and teachers’ responses to these demands, contribute to contested practices in and across these domains, both arising from and resulting in what is described as a ‘hybridised’ habitus. The research gestures towards the need to cultivate conditions conducive to more educationally oriented, critical, situated and collaborative CPD.

A logic of 'linking learning': leadership practices across schools, subject departments and classrooms

Abstract This article considers the roles of school leaders, a departmental-level leader and a teacher in implementing a reform within a school, and the nature of the relations between the groups and individuals that attended this process. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s “thinking tools”, the article analyses the nature of the leadership practices surrounding the implementation of a single-sex mathematics class from the perspective of key participants in the change process: two school-level leaders, one departmental chair, and the teacher charged with teaching the class. By considering a secondary school and one of its constituent departments as a field and sub-field, respectively, we argue that even as there is evidence of contestation over the nature of the practices that influence or potentially influence the leadership practices at play within the field and sub-field as a whole, there are also significant learnings in relation to student learning on the part of those involved which serve as “links” between the leadership practices at the school and department levels, and the leadership of learning of the teacher implementing the reform. In this way, a logic of “linking learning”, guided by an ethic of concern for students’ success, was evident across school, department and classroom.