Young Children’s Everyday Inquiry: A Field Study of a Young Girl’s Play Across Contexts

This paper documents the naturally occurring ways in which very young children encounter opportunities for inquiry in their everyday lives. Understanding these early childhood practices is a necessary first step in drawing on these practices as resources for science inquiry learning. Using approximately 35 hours of interactional video data of a twoyear-old girl in home and preschool settings, I describe the inquiry practices in which she engages at home, particularly how she orchestrates adult support for inquiry, and how she draws on aspects of her home inquiry practice in school. Based on her everyday experiences with inquiry and the common interactional arrangements of home and school environments, I suggest ways for conceiving of each setting as having affordances for the support of science inquiry among very young children. Introduction Researchers are seeking to identify resources for science classroom learning in the rich variety of practices found within children’s everyday lives. These resources include ways of thinking and talking about everyday experiences which are embedded within cultural communities and their practices (Bricker & Bell, 2007; Hudicourt-Barnes, 2003; Warren, Ogonowski, & Pothier, 2005). The literature documents everyday practices as rich, varied, and most importantly productive for science learning. However, few have spent time articulating the details of the interactional arrangements in which these practices are embedded (Stevens, Satwicz, & McCarthy, 2008), or examined how differences in the kinds of interactions across contexts impact participation in these practices as resources for learning. It is within interactions that individuals do the work of trying to understand everyday experiences. Individuals work together in interactions to mutually co-construct meaning, contexts, and the activity itself (Erickson & Schultz, 1997). If everyday activity provides resources for science inquiry, we must understand how people mutually orient to and “do” inquiry in their everyday lives. I begin this paper with a discussion of current conceptualizations of everyday inquiry. I then follow one child across two settings to understand the ways she works to draw in adults to support her questioning, the responses of adults in various settings, and the resulting co-constructed activity. I also explore the affordances of the interactional arrangements in which these naturally occurring inquiry experiences occur across the multiple contexts of this child’s life, and how practices found in one context may be drawn upon in another. What We Know About Everyday Inquiry Current research shows that people build their knowledge based on everyday experiences. As toddlers, we build explanatory accounts to help us make predictions about what might happen in the future (Hawkins & Pea, 1987), and much of these explanatory accounts are influenced by the ways we learn to notice, ask questions, and provide explanations (Crowley, Callanan, Jipson, et al., 2001; Goodwin, 2007). From the very first moments of our lives, the communities in which we live shapes the ways we observe, think, and talk about the world (Cole, 2007). Despite the importance of these everyday experiences for very young children, we have an inadequate understanding of them (Callanan & Jipson, 2001). While existing research has examined young children’s causal questions in everyday settings (Callanan & Oakes, 1992; Hood & Bloom, 1979), causal questions are only one element of inquiry, and not all good inquiry takes the form of causal questions. There are also many ways of participating in inquiry beyond questioning. Thus, the existing literature provides only a start to understanding children’s early inquiry experiences. A more detailed examination of children’s encounters with inquiry within everyday contexts is needed. Many researchers argue there are important similarities between everyday thinking and how scientists think about inquiry: both attempt to provide explanations of our world, and both use many of the same intuitive practices to understand complex phenomena (Hawkins & Pea, 1987; Ochs, Gonzales, & Jacoby, 1996). Dewey (1981) argues inquiry in all settings is the process of noticing a problematic situation and working to better understand that situation in a way that allows for a satisfactory resolution to the problem. This may include questioning, relating the problem to other problems, or representing and discussing the problem. Dewey’s definition of inquiry is applicable to both an informal everyday sense of inquiry as well as a formal scientific one, although the rules and norms for a satisfactory resolution in everyday inquiry are different than those for formal science (Hawkins & Pea, 1987). While everyday inquiry is not the same as classroom or professional science inquiry, it shares important patterns and can help build a foundation for later inquiry learning. Rather than see the everyday and scientific as dichotomies, some (Dewey, 1981; Ochs & Taylor, 1992; Stevens & Hall, 1998; Warren, Ballenger, Ogonowski, Rosebery, & Hudicourt-Barnes, 2001 among others) argue for a © ISLS 315 ICLS2012 Volume 1: Full Papers