Understanding the Teacher’s Role in a Knowledge Community and Inquiry Curriculum

Knowledge and Community Inquiry (KCI) is an innovative instructional model that integrates a dimension of scaffolded inquiry within a knowledge community approach. While early studies of KCI successfully implemented the model in the form of substantive curricular units, the teacher’s role within those curricula was not clearly explicated, nor is it included formally within current versions of the model. This dissertation seeks to clarify the teacher’s role in the KCI model by examining one KCI curriculum unit in which three high school science teachers coordinated five sections of a ninth grade general science course (n = 106) to collectively study the topic of climate change over a nine-week period. One teacher had been engaged in the development of the curriculum. The study uses open coding and content analysis to examine: (a) the teacher’s role as it was designed or intended in the curriculum design; (b) the three teachers’ prior knowledge and experience, to examine the knowledge disparity among the teachers; (c) the teachers’ enactment of the curriculum, to capture what teachers actually did in their classroom, as contrasted with the designed curriculum; and (d) the teachers’ interaction with students, to identify the interaction patterns and their relationship to the teachers’ prior knowledge and experience. Curriculum design documents, teacher interviews, and video recordings of classroom teaching provided the data sources. The curriculum design analysis identified six categories of teacher’s role: (a) content lecturing, (b) evaluating students, (c) introducing learning activities, (d) making connections, (e) explanation or elaboration, and (f) classroom management. The teacher knowledge analysis identified the differences among the teachers in terms of the knowledge and experience of: (a) scientific content on climate change, (b) inquiry and community learning pedagogy, (c) their role as a teacher, (d) technology’s role in teaching, and (e) in the coherence of their knowledge. The enactment analysis revealed that all teachers performed more roles than the research team had anticipated in the designed curriculum. The interaction analysis indicated that while teachers spent a lot of class time dealing with logistical and pedagogical issues, they also spent considerable time guiding students’ learning activity, setting the learning context, and helping students to elaborate their ideas. The contributions of this study include: (a) a formal description of the teacher’s role in the KCI model, (b) specific guideline for teachers teaching with KCI model, (c) scientific information concerning different forms of teacher knowledge and their correlation with classroom practice, (d) methods of analysing teacher-student interaction and measuring the coherence of teachers’ knowledge.Ph.D