In this article, I elucidate the idea of a poetics of teaching and outline its value to scholars and teachers who seek a deeper understanding of the practice. A poetics of teaching draws together aesthetic, intellectual, and moral dimensions of the work that are often treated separately, if treated at all, in both research and in the classroom. In…

Science notebooks are fixtures in many science classrooms, but are students using them to their full potential? Ideally, science notebooks should be tools for students to grapple with scientific concepts and make sense of their understandings using recording and organizing strategies that are personally meaningful. Many times, however, students…

Fish dissections are a great way to introduce the concepts of food webs, predator-prey relationships, and ecosystems, but these labs are expensive, messy, smelly, and require a lot of supervision because of the tools involved. The author has developed an inexpensive, safe, and clean alternative where students "dissect" simulated fish…

Major educational policy groups call on learners to engage in inquiry-based activities. With a growing amount of information now available online, there is an increased focus on online inquiry where learners ask research questions; search digital libraries and other information sources; and read, assess, and synthesize that information.…

In higher education, there is a challenge to gain the full benefit of the potentials of learning technology for collaborative knowledge advancement and for scaffolding practices of academic literacy and scientific argumentation. The technology, ideally, would be used to provide support that enables students to deal with more demanding tasks than…

In this article, the authors discuss their belief in organizing curricula around sets of causal models in order to provide students with opportunities not only to learn about the subject matter of particular disciplines, but also about how scientific knowledge is generated and justified. They describe a nine-week genetics course for high school…

Reflecting on Bill Foster's influence on the author's work leads to reflections about the lifelong dialogue among scholars whose thinking and writing is continually refreshed and deepened by a scholarly field of dialogue. Over time, a dialogue between two scholars illuminates earlier scholarly influences on each of them, leading to the enrichment…

This article presents a response to Kingsley Price's argument on the seemingness of the emotionality of music. For Price, music is not a person, cannot possibly harbor an inward life, and cannot possibly be emotional. He argues that since music is not personal, it cannot be emotional but can only seem emotional. He then sets out to discover how…

We outline a theoretical view of narrative inquiry as both phenomenon and method, and we explore the growth and development of narrative inquiry in the field of education. Drawing on research with participants labeled as developmentally disabled, we show how narrative inquiry can illuminate how disability is understood and lived out in social,…

An examination of how the use of descriptive analysis of children's work such as the Modified Descriptive Review process supported professional inquiry and growth for educators and for children they serve, is presented. The Modified Descriptive Review process fed immediate actions as well as the posing and exploring of large questions about…

Inquiry-based instruction teaching helps students to think independently and scientifically, which in turn enables problem solving ability in them. Different approaches to encourage inquiry-based instructions like verification approach, and discovery approach are discussed by matching the background knowledge and reasoning skills among the…

Phenomena associated with the "pendulum" present numerous opportunities for assessing higher order human capabilities related to "scientific inquiry" and the "discovery" of natural law. This paper illustrates how systematic "assessment of scientific inquiry capabilities", using "pendulum" phenomena, can provide a useful tool for classroom teachers…

This article suggests that while educational psychology espouses an ecological view of human development, the implementation of practices that reflect this perspective has often been obstructed. In many circumstances, practices that attribute problems to individuals, or groups of individuals, continue. These contrast with ecological practices that…

Peirce was a thinker who claimed that his mind had been thoroughly formed by his rigorous training in the natural sciences. But he was also the author who proclaimed that nothing is truer than true poetry. In making the case for Peirce's relevance to issues of education, then, it is necessary to do justice to the multifaceted character of his…

This article aims to contribute to the literature on conceptual change by engaging in direct theoretical and empirical comparison of contrasting views. We take up the question of whether naive physical ideas are coherent or fragmented, building specifically on recent work supporting claims of coherence with respect to the concept of force by…