Learning by doing: exploring child–inquiry in teacher preparation

Progressive practices, such as an emergent curriculum and inquiry pedagogy, work with young children’s natural inclinations toward play while building such skills as critical thinking and collaboration. However, novice teachers often struggle to learn how to use progressive practices in their teaching. This is a reflection of practice targeting the experiences of students in an early childhood teacher preparation program who were tasked with using the Project Approach, a contemporary approach with progressive foundations, in their field placements. In this program, faculty model the Approach and then mentor students to facilitate an inquiry project with young children over four weeks. Students’ experiences show thoughtful engagement with inquiry based-practices in field placements, though some students struggled to understand the deep work of facilitating inquiry projects with children.