ABSTRACT
For many years I have been engaged in an exploration of struggles in my own teaching as I seek to balance a desire to be open to children’s thinking with a search for ways to connect the powerful and lasting ideas of the discipline I so enjoyed studying as a student. There was a marked departure in my teaching and research when I began to compare the ways children and scientists talk about the world in similar and often strikingly different ways. Although I had been well socialized to believe that teaching science was a venture to impart correct answers and scientific truth to high-school chemistry and physics students (Lortie, 1975), I became dissatisfied with those students who would helplessly defer, “Is this correct?” With each instance I became more committed to the quest to learn how to change students’ thinking and dispositions toward the scientific endeavor I knew could be so much more. I was reminded that my students’ questions about correct answers were results of my own hypocrisy. I was asking the wrong kinds of questions for my students to truly think, and it was
C H A P E I
Randy Yerrick San Diego State University
the opening quote from Schwab (1962) that first challenged me to engage as a researcher of my own classroom. My teaching efforts were inadequate in getting students to act like scientists, and the fact that I was aware of it seemed worse than blissfully going about teaching the way it had always been done.
