As mentioned above, I attended a conference in Berlin marking the conclusion of the “Pollen” network which was set up to promote Inquiry Based Science Education (IBSE) in primary schools across 10 European countries. Some of the key points for me were
- Some level of IBSE has always taken place in European schools although this would vary from country to country e.g. Hands-on, practical work is emphasised in the UK compared to say, Ireland. It is therefore culturally situated.
- It is difficult to unambiguously define IBSE as such definitions are invariably value-laden. There is a lot of debate as to what exactly constitutes IBSE which makes evaluating the impact of interventions problematic. The literature on educational change makes it clear that it is critical to have clarity about what is intended in order that interventions persist beyond the period of funding and are owned by all stakeholders.
It seems to me that it is important to get an idea of how IBSE is “operationalised” in each of the countries involved - what evidence is there for IBSE practice and how does change (if at all) as a result of interventions? This would allow us to get away from a purely academic debate as to what constitutes IBSE to determine it “empirically”. The question then becomes, how do we gain insight into the nature of IBSE?
I think Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) might prove a useful framework here. PCK was first introduced as a concept to describe teaching practice by Shulman in 1986. As the name would imply, it represents the particular domain knowledge of the teacher at the intersection of the Venn diagram between pedagogy and content knowledge, including awareness of analogies, likely conceptions and misconceptions, effective tasks, and so on. This concept proved very attractive in science educational research and several authors have made significant contributions to developing PCK “tools”. John Loughran in particular has developed PCK tools that describe and have been shown to have a transformative impact on teaching practice.
Why not try and use these tools to get an explicit idea of the nature of practice and how it transforms? Is it possible to gain some insight into the issues raised above? Would be very interesting I think to see this across all of Europe. For now, we are hoping to get it off the ground in Ireland.
Must start adding to this more fequently!
