Pedagogical Change and Mourning in Elementary Teacher Education

Learning and mourning both entail renegotiating the sense of self in a changed world. We reflect on the Science Semester, an inquiry-based course for prospective elementary teachers, by drawing on theories of mourning to address students' resistance to inquiry pedagogies not as deficits in students or curriculum, but as students meaningfully grieving the perceived loss of their good-student selves and dreams of being loving teachers. Questioning the impulse to make learning unproblematic, we consider possibilities for caring and renewal in inquiry pedagogies that elicit deeper inquiries into loss and mourning as conditions of teaching and learning.