Collaborative Inquiry and the Professional Development of Science Teachers

In this article I argue that the nature and meaning of collaborative relationshipsare highly dependent upon the particular, practical settings in which they occur.To obtain a better understanding of a claim that a given project is collaborative,that claim must be examined in view of the specific purposes, processes, andrelationships engendered by that project. To illustrate this argument I describean on-going, science teacher development project and outline the fundamentalpostulates on which the project was based. Both a practical and a theoreticalrationale are advanced to explain why a form of collaborative inquiry wasessential to the project. A set of general principles linking the various types ofcollaborative relationships found in the project is identified and discussed.