Wonder as a tool to engage preservice elementary teachers in science learning and teaching

Abstract

This exploratory project considers the use of wonder as a pedagogical tool with preservice elementary teachers (PSETs). An ongoing vexation facing science teacher educators is helping future elementary teachers overcome anxiety and negative associations with science due to their own school science experiences, while simultaneously encouraging innovative and ambitious teaching practice. Utilizing wonder as a pedagogical tool for emotional and aesthetic engagement with science holds promise as an entry point to connect future teachers with meaningful science content and practice. The link between wonder and science is well‐articulated by successful scientists throughout history, and yet is rarely employed explicitly within elementary or teacher education science learning contexts. Forging a pedagogy of wonder demands connection to the emotive embodiment of science as a uniquely human process that nurtures our intense need to know. This qualitative case study is an effort to better understand if utilizing pedagogy intentionally focused on wonder could impact PSETs’ perceptions of science and scientific thinking. This paper describes the key findings that emerged while utilizing pedagogy steeped in wonder with PSETs, and the degree to which engaging with wonder impacted their perceptions of science and their future science teaching. This research supports the critical role that wonder could play in changing PSETs’ relationship with science and assisting them in the development of the pedagogical courage necessary to envision possibilities beyond their past experiences.

Reclaiming Liberal Education

“…Teaching from a liberal education perspective entails seeing knowledge not as facts to be transmitted in order to be reproduced in a test, but as ideas that have the power to evoke a sense of mystery and wonder [23,45], and which can become sources of immense intellectual satisfaction, and even inspire [64]. The evidence, at least in the area of science education, does support this claim [65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72]. The notion of 'intellectual satisfaction' seems to have been downplayed-it is not a mainstream idea in educational discourse-or it is simply something that has been taken for granted.…”

An innovative STEM outreach model to foster the next generation of geoscientists, engineers and technologists (OH-Kids)

“…Perhaps the most important characteristic of the workshop is that it enables new ways of imparting knowledge related to a real research project to children, fostering the use of wonder as a pedagogical tool for emotional and aesthetic engagement with science (Gilbert and Byers, 2017).…”

Learning and loving of nature in the Anthropocene

“…Another problem with most current education practices and their too-"narrow" presentation of the natural sciences is that it often becomes a matter of cramming facts at the expense of refl ection, curiosity, critical thinking and a more holistic understanding. 31 "Reports on science education elaborately assess how preschool children demonstrate cognitive readiness for science, but do not consider or discuss possible long-term mechanisms which could hamper or promote deep curiosity and the persistent joy of learning. (National Research Council 2007, 2012).…”