REDISCOVERING JOHN DEWEY’S MODEL OF LEARNING THROUGH REFLECTIVE INQUIRY

Abstract

During the 21st century, in the sphere of Science education, there has been an increasing interest in the problem of operationalizing reflection because it’s one of the most powerful mechanisms for developing students’ thinking and forming key competencies – learning to learn and science literacy. The classical legacy of the American philosopher and pedagogue John Dewey provides a source for valuable ideas for solving this problem. The goal of this qualitative study is to focus on John Dewey’s concept for reflective inquiry as well as on the interpretations of his ideas by other authors. The intention is to merge these interpretations into a whole for two reasons: 1) to reconstruct John Dewey’s model for reflective inquiry, 2) to adapt this model to the peculiarities of Science education practice. To realize this goal, a comparison should be drawn between the meanings of key concepts from Dewey’s texts and those in the texts of his followers and reviewers. As a result of this interpretive framework, the authors of this paper abandon the general understanding that the stages of reflective thinking comprise a main component in Dewey’s concept for reflective inquiry. The emphasis moves to the connection between reflection and the actions in the course of inquiry. On the basis of reconstructing Dewey’s model, the authors suggest ideas for actualizing and activating students’ reflection before, during and after completing different types of experiments. Key words: reflection, inquiry-based learning, science education.