Educative experiences and early childhood science education: A Deweyan perspective on learning to observe

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Abstract

This paper is a report of work conducted at an urban elementary professional development school in the eastern US. John Dewey's explication of ‘educative experiences’ is applied to describe curriculum involving small animals as a basis for teaching science inquiry processes, particularly the process of observation. The analysis is qualitative and interpretive; the data consist of observations, transcripts of science study group meetings, and interviews with five participating teachers in grades kindergarten through third. A principal objective of this analysis is to provide recommendations concerning how we might help preservice elementary teachers create effective approaches to science curricula that utilize real-world science experiences to inspire and develop children's learning in science.

Introduction

In my elementary science methods courses, most preservice students enthusiastically state that connections to the ‘real world’ are vitally important in engaging children in science learning. However, preservice teachers often struggle to create science instruction that engages children in real-world activities along with learning scientific concepts: They can envision children enjoying exploring the world through hands-on activities, and they can picture children gaining knowledge through texts and teacher lecture. Methods that help to link the two seem to puzzle or elude them. However, the impetus toward developing real-world connections is one that I want to nurture in my students. How might I do so such that my students grow in their sophistication of the potential of real-world science for young children?

One way to help my students develop science teaching approaches that help children learn science through the use of real-world activities is to focus on ways that practicing teachers manage to do so. In this article, I address this effort by focusing particularly on how some early elementary teachers provide real-world contexts for science via the study of classroom animals. I set forth some descriptions and discussions of these teachers’ science pedagogy, and follow with speculations on how what I have learnt from these teachers helps me to think about teaching my own students. My teaching background is in secondary education and college-level science education. I have not had the daily experiences of elementary school teaching that might provide one with appropriate wisdom to share with elementary preservice teachers. Therefore, I choose to conduct research with practicing elementary teachers who are committed to teaching science in their classrooms. I aim to interpret their talk about and my observations of their teaching in ways that may provide insight into teaching elementary science methods to preservice teachers.

I have chosen John Dewey's description of ‘educative experiences’ to puzzle through what I am learning from practicing elementary school teachers. As was Dewey, I am interested in the interactions among teacher, students, and the objects of study—material objects as well as intellectual objects such as science processes and concepts. In the following section, I provide a brief review of Dewey's description of educative experiences. Succeeding sections delineate my methodology and findings.

Section snippets

‘Educative experiences’ and early elementary science teaching

I use the Deweyan conception of ‘educative experiences’ because it connects well with my preservice elementary students’ conception of ‘real-world’ or ‘hands-on’ learning in science. [From this point forward, I will use the phrase ‘real-world’; although my students tend to use ‘hands-on,’ the former phrase is more general, and can refer to classroom activities and studies that involve actual physical entities—those that children do actually touch, and those that they do not.] Preservice

The research setting: an urban professional development school

Monarca Elementary School1 is an urban public school in a poor to working-class immigrant neighborhood on the east coast of the United States. Monarca's approximately 650 students are predominantly Latina/o, most with family ties to the Dominican Republic. Many others are from Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Ecuador; recently, a number of students from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the former Yugoslavia have joined

Methodology: learning with and from teachers

In the capacities of a science education professor and colleague in a professional development school (PDS) partnership, I worked with teachers at Monarca Elementary School in learning about their perspectives and practices concerning teaching science with children, with the ultimate purpose of enriching my teaching of elementary science education. To cite a Queens College (New York City) mathematics educator, Fran Curcio, in reference to her own long-term research and teaching relationship

Animals in the classroom: practicing the processes of science

In Monarca classrooms, learning to observe is central to science instruction, and provides the basis for other scientific processes, such as recording, designing experiments, and questioning. In addition, much of the instruction concerning observation is explicit. During interviews and conversations with teachers, I noticed that they were repeatedly using the word ‘observe’ to describe what their children were doing in science. Kate, a kindergarten teacher, said that ‘for kindergarten,

Discussion: designing educative experiences

As I have summarized above, Dewey argued that educative experiences are located in a continuum of children's ongoing experiences. The teacher's role in creating educative instruction is to design settings in which children's interests are piqued and purposes for learning inspired, and to develop instruction to support the development and realization of these purposes. Being young humans, children are naturally good at observing, when observing is defined as noticing and following behaviors or

Implications for teacher education

How can this analysis inform teacher education, and preservice elementary students’ conceptions of ‘real-world activities’ in their instruction? Elementary science teacher education students generally indicate an interpretation of constructivism that leads to puzzlement: Because they assume they are to stay out of the way of children's developing thinking, they are uncertain about their role in children's learning. Examples such as those from Monarca, in which teachers do indeed set up

Acknowledgments

This work would not be possible without the enthusiastic collaboration and friendship of the teachers at Monarca Elementary School. The author also thanks Bill Rosenthal and the anonymous reviewers of this article for advice, editing, and encouragement.

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