A Workshop Approach to Developing the Professional Pedagogical Vision of Irish Secondary Preservice Science Teachers

This article reports on an investigation of a workshop approach to probe and deepen Irish preservice teachers' (PSTs') initial professional pedagogical vision of inquiry-based science education (IBSE). In an effort to understand the experiential and historical foundation of their vision, we report on the current culture of science teaching and assessment within the Irish school system and contrast it with the aims set out at a policy level as a way of contextualizing teacher candidates' ideas about IBSE. We describe a workshop approach designed to engage PSTs in IBSE activities and an analysis framework that allows us to elicit the PSTs' professional pedagogical vision, specifically the key practices of coding and highlighting, from critiques of inquiry activities they carried out in the workshop. We offer the workshop approach as a viable complement to video analysis of exemplary teaching episodes and demonstrate the analytical power of the approach by reporting what practices the PSTs highlighted as constituting IBSE and how they coded the purpose of the practices they highlighted. We use these highlighted practices and coded purposes as indicators of their professional pedagogical vision of IBSE, and reveal the extent to which PSTs adapt the tenets of IBSE to fit in with their desire for students to remember science facts.