Education Commons^™

Terms Of Inquiry, Margaret A. Macintyre Latta, Gayle Buck, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, Lora Carpenter

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Teaching and learning continues to be driven by a version of professionalism that construes practice to be a form of applied science. This paper challenges that paradigm. In particular, subjecting and assimilating practical activity to a technical mode of rationality is challenged as not being the most appropriate way to approach teaching, learning, and the process that drives both of these phenomena, inquiry. Middle school science classrooms provide the contexts to explore the situated consequences of embracing the terms of inquiry. Placing inquiry at the core of the thinking and experiences of middle school science educators as a philosophical/theoretical/practical educative …