Student World Teacher

Students and Teachers Exploring Our World Together

We are a scientist and science educator. We share a commitment to inquiry of the natural world as an instructional approach to attract, retain, and educate k-12 students in science. In our work with teachers, we utilize inquiry to enhance teachers' knowledge of scientific phenomena and develop their skills to engage k-12 students in inquiry learning experiences that reflect what scientists do.

StudentWorldTeacher reflects a fundamental premise and aspect of this work. Namely, that an educative learning environment consists of three elements: Student, World, and Teacher.

World occupies the central position for three reasons:

• It is the external reality that generates experiences, observations, and questions that form the basis of inquiries out of which learners construct ideas.
• It is the external reality against which learners test out their different ideas.
• It is the subject matter that mediates the Student-Teacher relationship.

The graphic representation of three intersecting circles conveys the notion that educative environments involve the meaningful intersection of Student, World and Teacher. Looking closely at the world captures learners' attention, curiosity and interests and initiates exploratory activities. Teachers facilitate learning by introducing appropriate materials to sustain learners' self-initiated activities.

The teaching-learning enterprise and teacher-student relationship, once linear and hierarchical, is transformed into one that is reciprocal and dialogic as teaching responds to learning. In this process, teachers gain deepened respect for the different thoughts that students have, their frameworks for understanding the world, and their capacity to build new frameworks based on new inquiries. Students develop a vision of teachers as individuals who create environments that facilitate their learning.

Through following students' explorations, teachers deepen their knowledge of the subject matter, their understanding of student thinking, and their structuring of the subject matter to open the world to students.

Students deepen their understanding of the world by self-exploring natural phenomena guided along their path by teachers.

The relationship is inter-dependent as explorations of one, widens and opens the world/understanding of the other.