Abstract:

The author has been working for the past twelve years with grade 6-12 science teachers at a private school for girls in rural India. Little progress has been made with convincing the teachers to move toward inquiry-based learning despite the state of Karnataka common syllabus and the chairman of the school requiring it. Being the first visit back to the school since 2019, progress had been halted and the teachers were back to using didactic and expository methods again. Understandably, this move was somewhat required by the move to online learning caused by the global pandemic. Determined to understand the teachers' reasoning the author conducted a series of interviews with teachers using D. Llewellyn's Inquiry Within as a frame of reference.

Several reasons were common to the teachers' responses including lack of time, lack of training, being convinced that inquiry cannot be graded, feeling that doing inquiry lessens the rigor of the scientific process, and that inquiry should only be for lower elementary children. The teachers were also constrained by the belief in only one correct answer. This played out in student laboratory notebooks being marked incorrect because students recorded what they actually observed and not what they were supposed to have observed.

To the teachers’ credit there were attempts at using inquiry during the author’s visits to the school. By the students’ confusion it was easy to tell that the lesson was for the author’s benefit and not the usual classroom practice.

While it is true that the COVID-19 pandemic caused instruction to move exclusively online for a year making inquiry teaching difficult and there was at the school a large turnover of the science faculty, many of the reasons given by the teachers fail to be borne out by the literature of science education. This work in progress describes the successes and setbacks of moving the teachers back to an inquiry-based teaching and learning trajectory.

Keywords:

Science, education, inquiry, India.