본교육과정 지식을 선정하는 데 있어서 관련 교과가 지향하는 사회 직업 세계의 실천적 지식을 우위에 두어야 한다는 것은 교육과정이론에서 오랫동안 제기되어온 문제이다. 이러한 논의는 활동 중심 교과나 탐구식 수업을 강조하게 되는 배경으로 작용해 왔고, 이는 최근 구성주의 논의에서 더욱 두드러지게 나타난다. 한편, 활동 중심 교과의 활성화에 따라 어떻게 탐구식 수업을 설계하고 실행해 옳기냐 하는 것은 교육 연구에서뿐만 아니라 현장 교사들에게도 가정 널리 인지된 관심사 가운데 하나이다. 이러한 관심사는 학생들로 하여금 질문을 가지고 출발하여 결과에 이르는 과정으로서의 활동을 하도록 하는 실제적인 문제와 관련된다. 그러나 교과 내용을 그 교과가 지향하는 실천적 지식에 맞게 가르친다는 것이 무엇인가에 관한 처방과 논의는 지속적으로 제기되어 왔으며, 이는 거꾸로 생각하면 탐구식 수업이 현실적으로 정착되기가 쉽지 않다는 점을 반증한다고 할 수도 있다. 이러한 난점이 왜 생기는지 알아보기 위해 이 논문에서는 과학 교과의 경우를 중심으로 실제 초등학교 과학과 수업 가운데 일상적으로 흔히 관찰할 수 있는 간단한 예와 함께 살펴보기로 한다.

Teaching of practical knowledge is one of the most enduring claims for the authentic teaching method, and for teachers it remains as a practical matter of classroom lessons. The practical matter for teachers has to do with decision-making in the course of instruction concerning when the teaching for authentic learning would be. While educational studies have been comprehending practical knowledge that should be identified as the contents of school subjects, they find their pedagogical suggestions of practical knowledge as coherently supported repertoire for educational reform. This study pursues such problematic in demonstrations in science classroom lessons. In the science education field, an emphasis on the teaching of procedural knowledge brings into fore a mode of inquiry style learning, which has been supported by various theoretical backgrounds. While such a style of teaching has been coherently recommended in various forms of teaching model on the one hand, one the other hand a question which reflects a difficulty in implementing such a style of teaching seems to be never dismissed. One of the dissolutions of such a puzzle is to reconsider the social dimension of classroom lessons. When we take the social dimension in which classroom lessons are demonstrated into consideration, we can find a different view of teaching of inquiry learning. This study begins by closely examining the nature of the demonstration of lessons, which shows that the demonstration is not a demonstration of inquiry in which students watch and await unexpected outcomes, but a demonstration of lessons in which its interactional production shapes what participants see, talk about, hear, and thus what they do next. For the teacher, the task is to keep attuning what happens into what is supposed to teach. For students, the task is to find a coherence between what happens and what has been expected. Such a task is not so much discovery of conceptual principle nor objective phenomena as a discovery of the next step in the course of practical actions. Such a procedure of interactional production works as curriculum activity for teacher and students alike. The close description of the field shows the teaching of "learning by doing" in the mundane classroom practices.