acting human beings. For Dewey, teachers were a great deal more than vessels
through whom others’codified knowledge prescriptions passed through. Dewey
maintained that learning is deep-rooted in the experiences a teacher/student enters
into and the knowledge which arises from their inquiries. In Dewey’s view, the
inquiring mind is triggered by a perplexing experience or a discrepant event that
leads the student/teacher to think reflectively and to engage in some type of action
to resolve the problem. In this way, reflective thinking involves both the past and
the future in that students/teachers build upon previous experiences and present
knowledge to construct new knowledge to inform future experiences. Because of
these baseline understandings, Dewey advocated for an experimental approach to
science teaching. For him, the scientific process of inquiry was foundational to both
the discovery, use and application of scientific knowledge.
Joseph Schwab, who was Deweyan in orientation, advocated for students
learning scientific concepts through inquiry and reinforced the teaching of science
as inquiry in thefield of education. Schwab’s personal experiences as a scientist and
curriculum theorist convinced him that the inquiry approach was the most defen-
sible one.^1 For Schwab,“scientific research has its origin, not in objective facts
alone, but in a conception, a construction of the mind”(Schwab 1962 , p. 12). In his
iconic treatise onTeaching science as inquiry, he went on to say that
...the treatment of science as [i]nquiry is not achieved by talk about science or scientific
method apart from the content of science. On the contrary, treatment of science as [i]nquiry
consists of a treatment of scientific knowledge in terms of its origins in the united activities
of the human mind and hand which produce it; it is a means for clarifying and illuminating
scientific knowledge. (p. 102)It was not surprising, then, that Schwab was highly critical of textbooks that pre-
sented scientific facts as“rhetoric of conclusions”(p. 24)—that is, irrevocable
truths. Such assertions, in Schwab’s view, are only tentative stories because they
remain truthful only until new discoveries are made.
Having sketched the roots of teaching and learning as inquiry and science as
inquiry in place, we now turn to contemporary literature and policy documents
supporting science taught as inquiry.
30.3 Science as Inquiry: A Contemporary View
One of Dewey’s most salient contributions to science education, as mentioned
earlier, is the fact that he advocated an experimental approach to science teaching,
which was then reinforced by Schwab who similarly favored the approach.
Together, their influence is imprinted in the national standards and even in the
(^1) Bobby Abrol, a Research Assistant on the evaluation team, created a digital story around
Schwab’s contributions titledAn Inquiry into inquiry.The digital story can be viewed athttps://
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vL5WieX2RY.
30 Attracting, Preparing, and Retaining Teachers in High Need Areas... 457