Learners as phenomena: Expansive inquiry as students embody water particles

Abstract

Inquiry holds a special place in elementary science education, yet is often narrowly conceptualized leading to diminished understandings of the practice of inquiry for students and researchers. We present analysis of inquiry in action as 1st and 2nd graders oriented to exploring shared puzzles together using resources they deemed relevant in a Mixed-Reality learning environment. This environment privileged resources with which children were already familiar by inviting students to imagine being water particles and supporting them to explore how they needed to move together as particles to create different states of matter (solid, liquid, gas). By tracing students' sensemaking across several phases of inquiry while learning to make liquid together, we illustrate how students managed many challenges including those that were a result of having to embody the very phenomenon they were studying. We demonstrate learners' competent navigation of interactional challenges of making states together through collaborative choreographed movements and trace their embodied and conceptual accomplishments as they linked their motion as microscopic water particles to emergent creation of liquid water in the complex system. We draw on this analysis to suggest reconceptualizations of inquiry in the literature and to emphasize the need as researchers and educators to learn with and from children.