The Future of Education
Supporting early childhood teachers to teach astronomy through arts and inquiry
Maria Ampartzaki, University of Crete, Greece (Greece)
Konstantinos Tassis, University of Crete (Greece)
Vasiliki Pavlidou, University of Crete (Greece)
Michail Kalogiannakis, University of Crete (Greece)
Konstantinos Christidis, University of Crete (Greece)
Abstract
International research shows that young children can develop and improve their understanding of basic astronomy concepts through a combination of structured and open-ended activities based on inquiry-based and art-based learning approaches (1–4). In addition, research also indicates that teachers have difficulties reviewing and developing practices to accommodate appropriate processes in astronomy lessons (5–7). Considering the above findings, we organized an Educational Design Research project to support early childhood teachers in teaching astronomy through arts and inquiry. In this we developed a blended learning course which combined electronic study materials and face-to-face workshops to help teachers improve a) the content knowledge of basic astronomy concepts, b) the pedagogical content knowledge for teaching astronomy concepts in early childhood education and c) their understanding of inquiry-based and art-based approaches to learning. We assessed this course’s effectiveness through quantitative and qualitative data collected by a) questionnaires, and b) interviews. In this paper, we present a) the content of the training course, and b) the results of twofold data analysis: the statistical analysis of the quantitative data, and the thematic analysis of the qualitative data. Results showed improvement in teachers’ content and pedagogical content knowledge.
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Keywords |
Astronomy Education, Educational Design Research, Early childhood education, Art-based learning, Inquiry-based learning, E-learning |
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References |
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