A Science Teacher's Autoethnographic Reflections on Teaching Nature of Science

This autoethnographic study is part of a funded project involving a school science teacher and university science education researchers. In this project, we incorporated nature of science (NOS) into the fifth-grade curriculum and implemented it for a semester at a public school in Turkey. We adopted Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to the Nature of Science (RFN) framework and developed lesson plans that build on the first three units of the science education curriculum of the Ministry of National Education of Turkey (MoNE) (MEB, 2018). I, the first author, was the science teacher who implemented this NOS-enriched curriculum. I conducted RFN-based instruction in the experimental group while maintaining regular practice in the control group for 13 weeks. In this paper, we report the changes in my perception of NOS teaching throughout the semester. Data were gathered through the pre- and post-interviews and weekly journals. Throughout the intervention, I kept weekly journals, and in each journal entry, I answered a total of 15 pre-determined questions. Also, another researcher interviewed me before and after the intervention to evaluate the change in my perception of NOS teaching and its implications. Thematic and content analysis were used to analyze data from the interviews and journals. The findings indicate that this project enabled me to teach NOS more holistically and systematically. Additionally, I share my reflections on my expectations, concerns, difficulties, and suggestions for other science teachers as well as researchers to provide them with practical advice for implementing RFN in the science classroom.