(Craig 2014 ). Additionally, the cost of teacher attrition to the American economy
exceeds $2.2 billion dollars per year. The cost to the state of Texas’s economy
alone is over $800 million (Keigher 2010, in Craig 2014 ). The aforementioned
factors, among others, contribute to the U.S.’s teaching crisis. The annual
replacement of one-third of the country’s teaching workforce, mostly by new-
comers, is an inadequate approach to meeting societal demands. Also, alternate
forms of teacher certification/evaluation (26 competing service providers in Greater
Houston alone) and value-added approaches to accountability appear not to be
working. While Americans agree that teachers are vital to students’academic
performance and the country’s economic status, they are rancorously split about
how to address the national teaching calamity and similarly at odds concerning
what constitutes teacher quality.
Against this backdrop, a different model of secondary science teacher education
has emerged within the existing higher education structure at the University of
Houston. The model,teachHOUSTON,is a replication of the UTeach program
birthed at the University of Texas at Austin. In this chapter, we feature the
teachHOUSTONmodel for two important reasons. The first reason is that
present-day population mix in Texas resembles the U.S. in 2040. Second, Greater
Houston’s teacher attrition rate, particularly where secondary content area teachers
(mathematics, science, and special education) are concerned, is among the most
concerning in the U.S. and in the developed regions of the world. It is therefore
important to show howteachHOUSTONis successfully attracting, preparing and
retaining secondary science teachers in what appears to be an against-the-odds
situation.
We begin by briefly tracing the theoretical roots of teaching as inquiry and
science as inquiry and then discuss science as inquiry as presented in the con-
temporary literature and policy documents. After that, we further contextualize the
Texas educational scene, and elucidate infine-grained detail theteachHOUSTON
programme. We conclude with a sampling of whatteachHOUSTONgraduates
have to so say about their experiences of teaching and learning physics via the
inquiry process. Finally, we share twofigures: thefirst depicting the increasing
number of Greater Houston secondary school students served byteachHOUSTON
mathematics and science graduates instructing in their areas of specialization; and
the second capturingteachHOUSTON’s evolving approach to secondary science
as inquiry teacher education in the form of a model.
30.2 Theoretical Roots of Teaching as Inquiry and Science
as Inquiry
In North America, the origins of teaching as inquiry trace to John Dewey, and the
origins of science as inquiry also trace to Dewey and Joseph Schwab as well.
Dewey was thefirst to give mindedness to teachers and to see them as thinking,
456 C.J. Craig et al.