ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the pedagogical orientations of Malawian science teachers towards practical work. Data were collected through classroom observations, student questionnaire and post-lesson interviews. The lesson observation schedule and students’ questionnaire were similar to each other and adapted from an instrument used to measure the principles of scientific inquiry developed and trialled by Campbell, Abd-Hamid, and Chapman (2010). The instrument closely mirrored the science teaching orientation spectrum (Cobern et al., 2010), which was used as an analytical framework. The framework has two variants of direct instruction and two variants of inquiry instruction. The two variants of direct instruction are called Direct Didactic (DD) and Direct Interactive (DI) approaches, and the two variants of inquiry instruction are Guided Inquiry (GI) and Open Inquiry (OI). The findings from both the classroom observations and students’ questionnaire show that teachers use the DD pedagogical orientation in their practice of practical work. The teacher provides questions to investigate, procedures for doing so and ways for recording and analysing data. The students are, however, involved in collecting data which depicts a Direct Interactive pedagogical orientation. There is a mix of practice where some teachers allow their students to draw their own conclusions, but the majority also help the students to draw conclusions and justify them. Post-lesson interviews showed that these practices are influenced by the teachers’ understanding of the role of practical work, which does not include developing scientists. The implications of the findings on teacher education in Malawi are discussed.
