Abstract
This chapter is about the design and study of a pre-service teacher field experience that takes place at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s immersive space Q?rius (“curious”). Q?rius features more than 6000 specimens including shells, skeletons, fossils, rocks, and minerals that are organized in non-text collections that visitors can see, touch, and study under a microscope. Prospective 7th–12th grade teachers from the George Washington University’s Master of Education Program in Secondary Education were trained as museum volunteers to facilitate the Q?rius visitors’ experiences and tasked with attending to visitor thinking, facilitating questioning, and sustaining engagement with the artifacts. Practical outcomes for science teaching resulted in gaining confidence working with learners, becoming better questioners, and learning to inquire with visitors (instead of giving answers to them).
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Arthur Earle, Lisa Porter, Jill Sanderson, Christian Thomas, Bill Watson, and Nicole Webster for helping to design, launch, and sustain the program described in this chapter. We thank Jenna Carlson, Matty Lau, Jonathan Eakle, Lara Smetana, Kathleen Smith, and Binyu Yang for their contributions to this work. Finally, we thank the participating teacher candidates for contributing their journals and interview responses. This work was supported in part by a 100kin10 Collaboration Grant, as well as a grant from the National Science Foundation, Building Capacity for Disciplinary Experts in Math and Science Teaching, DUE 1439819. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily shared by the Foundation.
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Pyke, C., Sikorski, TR., Bray, R., Popson, C. (2018). Pre-service Teachers Developing PCK in a Natural History Museum. In: Uzzo, S., Graves, S., Shay, E., Harford, M., Thompson, R. (eds) Pedagogical Content Knowledge in STEM. Advances in STEM Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97475-0_10
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