Keys, Carolyn W. (1997). Presented in a Symposium on 'Perspectives on Inquiry-Oriented Teaching Practice: Clarification and Conflict' at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching at Chicago, April 21-24, 1997.

An underlying difficulty with inquiry teaching is the juxtaposition between freedom and privileging. Students need freedom to develop authentic knowledge, by building on their own ideas, yet science is an enterprise that has been constructed through the privileging of some ideas over others. The argument for freedom implies that if inquiry is a tool for constructing personal meaning of science concepts, the learner must be given the freedom to work from her own experiences. Teaching derived from a freedom perspective allows learners to choose content related to their interests, to generate their own inquiry questions, to invent methodologies, and to collect and make sense of empirical data. A proponent of the freedom perspective, Lijnse (1995, p2), made the following assertion, "we could say that we should not teach the concepts of science (as a product), not even in an above-mentioned constructivist way, but guide students in the activity of 'scientificalizing' their world." Allowing students freedom to make their own scientific decisions may foster a deeper understanding of the connections between questions, methodologies, data and knowledge claims.

The privileging perspective posits that learning science is essentially an enculturation into scientific ideas and ways of thinking. Teaching associated with this view emphasizes mediation into the concepts and understandings that are held in high regard by the scientific community. Writing from a privileging perspective, Driver, Asoko, Leach, Mortimer, and Scott (1994, p. 6) stated, "Scientific entities and ideas, which are constructed, validated and communicated through the cultural institutions of science, are unlikely to be discovered by individuals through their own empirical inquiry; learning science thus involves being initiated into the ideas and practices of the scientific community and making these ideas and practices meaningful at an individual level. The role of the science educator is to mediate scientific knowledge for learners, to help them make personal sense of the ways in which knowledge claims are generated and validated, rather than to organize individual sense making about the natural world." While some skillful teachers are able to design inquiry instruction that harmonizes both freedom and privileging (Roth & Roychoudhury, 1993), I believe that the majority of science teachers are confused and frustrated by rhetoric which calls on the one hand for students to design and conduct their own inquiries, and on the other hand for teachers to design inquiries that guide children to an understanding of difficult science concepts. Resolving the tension between freedom and privileging, or at least recognizing it, putting language to it, and learning to work between the ends of the continuum may be critical for the success of fostering inquiry learning in the science classroom.

Driver, R. Asoko, H., Leach, J., Mortimer, E. & Scott, P. (1994). Constructing scientific knowledge in the classroom. Educational Researcher, 23 (7), 5-12.

Lijnse, P. L. (1995). "Developmental research" as a way to an empirically based "didactic structure" of science. Science Education, 79, 189-199.