Inquiry and Experience-Based Science Learning in an Urban Public University's Early Childhood Education Program

• In Event: Preparing Educators to Teach for Democracy: Inquiry, Active Learning, Culturally Responsive, Antiracist/Anti-Oppressive, Humanizing Practice

Abstract

1. Objectives or purposes
This presentation focuses on a course on how young children learn science. Science learning, as the discovery and understanding of the physical world, is a very important part of young children’s learning considering the environmental and social challenges that our global community faces. Over the past two years that the instructor has been teaching this course, she has encountered some resistance among the students to using inquiry and experience-based approaches to science learning. To help address this resistance, she launched an inquiry into how the inquiry approach and “hands-on” learning experiences modeled in the course impacted the students’ thinking and teaching practices.

2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
This study is grounded in the perspective that learning is a process of constructing understandings through inquiry and direct experience. Further, the perspective of how to support the optimal education/preparation of teachers of young children is based on the notion that teacher candidates need to be provided with opportunities to explore and experience the investigative nature of science content and inquiry in ways that will elicit their own joy, wonder, and discovery so they can implement these approaches and rich content in their classrooms actively and directly.

3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
This qualitative study, conducted as part of a program faculty inquiry as well as an individual self-study over the course of a semester-long course on how young children learn science, addressed the question of what science learning teacher candidates identify as meaningful. The study also interrogated how, as a result of the course, teacher candidates see themselves as learners alongside young children. An open coding approach of collected data - assignments given to students in the course - was used to identify recurrent themes regarding these questions.

4. Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
To learn about early childhood graduate students’ learning experiences in this course, the following written assignments were reviewed:
•A short reflective essay assigned at the beginning of the semester, asking students to respond to the following question: how do you feel about science and how did you learn science as a child?
•Students’ ongoing journals recording their noticings, wonderings, questions, and discoveries on 2 semester-long inquiries and 3 project-based inquiries.
•A final paper that asks students to discuss what they have learned, how they plan to teach science using what they have learned to elicit young children’s interest, wonder, discovery, and joy.

5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions
Through their inquiries and active learning projects, teacher candidates experienced themselves as learners and came to understand the importance and power of inquiry and active learning in supporting the learning and development of the young children they serve.

6. Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
The findings from this research offer valuable insights on how to address the learning needs of early childhood teacher candidates from widely diverse backgrounds to create culturally sustaining, content rich and developmentally supportive learning experiences for their students.

Author

• Nancy Cardwell, City College of New York - CUNY