Mary Budd Rowe: a storyteller of science (original) (raw)

2008, Cultural Studies of Science Education

This article examines Mary Budd Rowe's groundbreaking and far-reaching contributions to science education. Rowe is best known for her research on wait-time: the idea that teachers can improve the quality and length of classroom discussions by waiting at least 3 s before and after student responses. Her wait-time research grew from and helped inform her staunch advocacy of science education as inquiry; Rowe saw wonder and excitement as central to the teaching and learning of science. She spent much of her professional life designing professional development experiences and innovative curriculum materials to help teachers, particularly elementary school teachers, enact inquiry in their classrooms. Keywords Mary Budd Rowe Á Wait-time Á Fate control Á Inquiry Á NSF-funded curricula Mary Budd Rowe saw science as ''a special kind of story-making'' (Patrick 1992, p. 2). Across her science education career, Rowe repeatedly argued against representations of science as long lists of vocabulary terms, disconnected facts, or right answers. Rather, Rowe encouraged teachers and students to understand science as story-as beginning with wonder, arguing from evidence, and proposing best-at-the-time explanations. The central and recurrent theme in such stories, she underscored, should be the excitement and importance of inquiring into the world around us. Rowe regularly infused her own stories about science and science education into discussions with students, teachers, and colleagues-whether in informal conversations with a doctoral student or in scripted presentations to large audiences. These stories provide a lens to view both who Rowe was as a science educator and how she thought science should be taught and learned in and out of schools. I begin this discussion of Mary Budd Rowe's contributions to science education with my favorite story about her told in her own words (Fig. 1).