Oregon State University Free Choice Learning Lab

I have 248 books in my house. Yes, I counted and no, that doesn’t count borrowed books. Topics range from travel to fiction to mystery to cookbooks to books on learning theory and biology. Obviously, I love to read. It should be a requirement for us as graduate students because we read a lot. Some of my books are like comfort food, comfort books I guess. When I need to escape into another world, I’ll pick up a book and read it cover to cover in a weekend and enjoy every word my eyes consume. And it feels like a guilty pleasure.

I’ve read a handful of my books more than once. For academic books I find myself re-reading chapters more than the entire book. Yet every time I re-read the pages I notice something new. It’s as though I’m reading through a different lens. And that’s because I am. I started exploring this idea when our theory group was reading Dewey’s Democracy and Education. Dewey writes, “’Reason’ is just the ability to bring the subject matter of prior experience to bear to perceive the significance of the subject matter of a new experience” (pg. 146). What Dewey means is that we see an event in connection to a larger framework, that by habit we see things through different lenses.

Our theory group is currently reading Acts of Meaning by J. Bruner. Bruner states so eloquently, “Books are like mountaintops jutting out of the sea. Self-contained islands though they may seem, they are upthrusts of an underlying geography that is at once local and…a part of the universal pattern. And so, while they inevitably reflect a time and a place, they are part of a more general intellectual geography” (pg. ix).

This is the second time I’m reading Acts of Meaning and I’m simultaneously reading Maps of Narrative Practice (M. White). It wasn’t until I picked Acts of Meaning up for the second time that I started realizing the similarities between it and White’s book, nor had I previously recognized how much White built on Bruner’s theory. I’m now reading both books through a different lens all to create the geography that underlines my doctoral research. I would encourage everyone to re-read a book. Who knows what you’ll discover this time around.

Jose-Antonio Orosco, an associate professor of philosophy at Oregon State University, wrote an inspiring piece about Dr. King at the “Common Dreams” newscenter website (https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/01/06-2). According to him, the Climate Justice Movement has the potential to prove King was right in believing that human beings can build the necessary insights to avoid mass destruction and develop activist resources to radically change morality as it exists in the world.

Change such morality, in order to build harmonious communities, means fighting the evil triplets Dr. King named racism, militarism and materialism. In this sense, ecology and sociology are not dissociated. They are intertwined in different forms of materialized injustice that make some people in economically fragile areas and countries more immediately vulnerable to climate change effects. What is the moral cost of climate change? That was the burning question of the “Philosophy Talk” radio program recorded live at OSU last year, where the hosts discussed the aspects related to changing our ways of life, rethinking life as we know, moving out of social/cultural inertia.

These are pragmatic challenges that have much to do with value placement, as the true costs of climate change are not just economic. Justice then is not just about mass protests in action; it is also about getting to the root of the problem as to build ethical alternatives to social and environmental issues. This morning I attended the 32^nd Annual Peace Breakfast and listened to an inspiring speech by Walidah Imarisha, a professor at Portland State University’s Black Studies Department. She talked about the MLK legacy and about a “revolution of values”, only possible when we break silence and unite in powerful voices.

Much like we have been discussing the divide between questions of science and philosophy, here too there is a divide to be bridged between environmentalism and social justice. The climate justice movement may in fact become the vehicle for dialogue and action grounded in such dialogue. Dialogicality, as we have been discussing in the work of Bakthin, is the key for meaning making. This is a parallel a see fit here, as reflecting on moral premises for social and environmental change is a business much intertwined with meaning making. It is not only nature that needs healing, but our social and spiritual essence as well, and that requires a vibrant dialogical relationship among humans and with non-human nature.

So, in the spirit of this special day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and OSU celebratory theme “Uniting our Powerful Voices”, lets foster that dialogue and get involved. It is not about what will happen if we do get consciously involved in such dialogue, it is about what won’t happen if we don’t. Find your call (if you haven’t already); understand your affinities as to where and how you can make meaningful contributions for a better beautiful world and for a better social world.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” (Martin Luther King Jr.)

Note: There are many activities going on right now at Oregon State as part of the Martin Luther King Jr. celebration. Here is a link for the calendar of events (http://oregonstate.edu/oei/mlk-events).

What role does religion play in science education? This is a question I have started to ask myself lately.

In my years as a science educator at an aquarium, religion seemed to be a dirty word. It had virtually no place in the institution I worked. Organization leaders shied away from the topic, and educators would roll their eyes if a group of religious home-schooled children were coming to visit.

And yet, research by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums shows that some people visit zoos and aquariums as “spiritual pilgrims” with the specific intent of seeking out contemplative/restorative experiences. According to the Pew Research Center, over 80% of the American population self-reports having a religious affiliation. 80%!

The mission statements of so many zoos and aquariums now involve more than education; there is often a goal to change the attitudes, beliefs, or actions of the visitors to their institutions. Yet these organizations continue to shy away from that which so many people’s value system has been built upon – their religious upbringing or affiliation. It’s as though zoos and aquariums have decided that science and religion are incompatible, “therefore we will pretend that religion doesn’t exist.”

How do these institutions expect to foster change if they are not willing or able to have an open dialogue with their visitors, many of whom clearly have a religious affiliation? How do they expect their visitors to address the internal conflicts that come up when science and religion butt heads?

Members of religious groups ARE opening up the dialogue around faith and the environment. As a Fellow with the organization Greenfaith, I participate with leaders of a variety of religious faiths as we grapple with questions about environmental justice, the definition of stewardship, and clarify the meaning of religious texts and traditions.

This open dialogue among and between members of all faiths is helping to fill the gap that the science education community has ignored. I am heartened to see people come together to create a clearer environmental identity. This is where the free-choice learning is really happening.

To the informal science education community – zoos and aquariums in particular — I say there is a place for religion in science education. Moreover, if your organization really expects to meet the lofty goals of your mission statements, it is imperative to open up a religious dialogue and directly address the religious attitudes and beliefs of your visitors. If you really want to change behavior or instill an environmental ethic, make your institution a relevant force in people’s lives. Foster a truly free choice learning environment by including religion in the conversation.

(Traci Reid is a guest poster to the FCL Blog and a 2013-2014 Greenfaith Fellow.)

To follow on last week’s discussion of vygotsky, another central tenet of Vygotsky’s work is that in order to understand development (and therefore learning), the researcher has to observe it in the process rather than in its products. He faulted the standard methods of psychological research of his day for focusing too much on training subjects to do particular tasks and then using those tasks to study cognition and development. His basic claim was that by the time the subject had mastered the task, the researcher had missed the development and learning and was now documenting some sort of fossilized action instead. He suggested alternative methods for creating conditions where learning, particularly the appropriation of meditational means and the development of concepts, could be brought into observation by the researcher working closely with research participants.

Those methods could be the subjects of future blog posts, but given last week’s topic of documenting personal sense making and how standardized ways of learning, testing, and research are not effective in generating or documenting personal sense, it’s interesting today to think about what sort of changes to research it would really take to arrive at rigorous ways of documenting the development of personal sense, including the role of emotions, values, beliefs, and biography in that development.

It seems that in part this kind of research itself still requires a substantial paradigm shift for researchers to stop “chasing” results/outputs as the key to understanding learning and to start encouraging this very chase itself as the subject of research. In our theory group right now, we are reading Jerome Bruner’s Acts of Meaning. Bruner outlines where the cognitive revolution veered away from being able to really understand the road map where development takes place, especially given the role of emotional patterns and their relationship to reflective states of mind. Bruner suggests that meaning cannot be pre assigned, so, like Vygotsky, he believes that meaning itself cannot be measured as an outcome of learning, but that learning can be seen in the process of making meaning. He suggests further that meaning making is different from information processing. This does not discount the importance of understanding how human beings process information. It does mean that education and learning have to be more than simply the business of training humans to use the tools that are necessary for life. Meaning, rather than knowing, should be the business of education as the ultimate way of “being.” This is very similar to Dewey’s arguments about the purposes of education in leading development. Like Dewey and Vygotksy, Bruner is talking about cultural shift in education, but also in research.

Bruner turned to the exploration of how everyday thinking tools (or meditational means more accurately) were appropriated for complex meaning making that included both public, shared meaning and personal sense. In Acts of Meaning, he describes the role of narrative, especially jointly constructed narratives, in shaping individual biography and identity over time. Retelling, re-narrating our experiences is in essence a reflective exercise in personal sense making, which also generates both public and shared meaning under the right circumstances. It is an exercise that brings to bear the very problematic of the so-called transformative education implicit in many of the other texts our group has been reading: the subjectivism, situatedness, and relativism circling human thinking and action and challenging the role of cognitive research. Accounting for such relativism and subjectivism not as gibberish or nonsense but as essential characteristics of human development, learning and behavior is to recognize the construction of meaning as transformative not authoritative. With that in mind, not only learning is a reflective state of mind but research itself should also be. What would a reflective research encompass? Perhaps it would be the type of research where its applied and flexible methodology consists of mediational means that lead to and promote a larger joint reflection between participants and researchers, allowing for a true dialogicality that moves quickly beyond the search for understanding of “fossilized” actions to the kind of active transformation of the research and learning situation that people like Dewey, Freire, and Vygotsky call for.

Such paradigmatic shift in the view of education and education research is nothing short of a “philosophical” debate between philosophy and science, our customary ways of knowing and seeking knowledge and how they came to be. The positivist characteristics of today’s research hindering the possibility for true dialogicality reflects nothing less than the human need to find some absolute truth and find it quickly. We can’t stand not knowing, not being able to trace down a beginning, middle and end for everything under some logical explanation. Embracing subjectivism and relativism as important pieces of the puzzle is recognizing there is no absolute truth when it comes to the human mind; it is to decrease the role of logic in favor of increasing the role of wonder in the process of knowing. This requires a cultural shift to assign reflective states of mind as the valued goal of education and research concerned with meaning making. Everything else would fall into place. Logicality can be unidirectional and give us tools for information processing, but dialogicality can’t. It requires exchange of reflections into retold narratives for it is the only way to unravel meaning making and acts of meaning.

Thanks to Susan O’Brien for her significant contributions to this post!

Meaning making is an idea that seems to resonate with lots of people studying learning or creating contexts for learning. We want visitors or students to make meaning of their experiences. As a construct, meaning making seems to be a way to capture the active elements of learning as well as the uniqueness of each learner’s prior experience and knowledge and the open ended nature of free-choice learning experiences in general.

But what do we really mean by meaning making? And how should we approach operationalizing it for research? For Vygotsky, meaning had two components – meaning proper and personal sense. The component of meaning in Vygotsky’s work focuses attention on the shared, distributed, what Bakhtin would call repeatable, and “public” denotations of a word, gesture, action or event. This is largely the aspect of meaning making that researchers have in mind when they are thinking about education. This approach to meaning encourages researchers to ask whether the students and learners are making the “right” meaning? Are the meanings that they are making recognizable and shareable with us, with more expert others, and with each other? Are they getting the content and ideas and concepts right? But this shared, public aspect is only a part of the whole of meaning that person makes.

For Vygotksy and generations of Activity Theorists, a more primary aspect of this shared, public, testable, and authoritative meaning is personal sense. The construct of personal sense attempts to capture the very personal, biographical, embodied, situated connotations of words, gestures, actions and events. This is the realm of what those things mean for us as part of our personal narratives about ourselves, our experiences, sense of place or even sense of ourselves. It is about how they resonate (or not) with our values, beliefs, judgments and knowledge. As learning researchers, we often discount or ignore this hugely important aspect of meaning making, and yet when people visit a museum or learn something new, this element of personal sense may be in the forefront of the experience. The realm of personal sense is where emotional experiences get burned into memory, where motivations and identities are negotiated, tried on, and appropriated or rejected. This is also the realm where we need the most help from learners as co-researchers. We can measure and document the meaning aspect of their meaning making relatively easily, but we rely on them to report about the personal sense they are making. As researchers, we should add to our documenting of the development of accurate and sharable meaning and develop serious ways to embrace the notion of reflection instead. Experiences that support meaning making as personal sense making are effective in supporting the overall learning process because they are essentially reflective.

What kinds of dialogues with learners most support that reporting are an open question to me right now. I’d welcome ideas here!

Happy New Year! With regards to Susan’s post on the final day of 2013, I appreciated the chance to reflect on my experiences and accomplishments of the past 12 months. I have already learned so much from my peers, my courses, and through work in the Cyberlab. I am looking forward to 2014 as it will be full of hard work and additional opportunities to build personal and professional skills while I conduct research in the field of free choice learning.

One area I am excited to continue studying are strategies and methods of communicating scientific information to the public. At the Visitors Center we are always striving to improve our exhibit design, and our personal methods of interpretation while interacting with visitors. We critique what we say and how we say it whether it is on exhibit signage or in conversation. Effective communication, particularly the translation of technical information to a diverse audience, is a skill that takes practice. The challenge is communicating the information in a way that is inclusive and avoids confusing jargon. Other members of our lab have discussed the value and elements of science communication through the blog and I am seeing more of these conversations occurring within the scientific community online.

As scientists and researchers, we are attempting to answer questions and understand natural phenomena. Why would we want to keep that information to ourselves? Are scientists motivated to share their work beyond formal conferences and peer-reviewed journals? With regards to the previous question, there is evidence that indeed scientists want to share their work with a wider network. For example, more and more researchers are writing blogs and using social media channels to showcase their findings. I recently joined Twitter and following #scicomm has been a valuable resource for me as I learn about this topic. The discussion covers many areas — whether scientists should be trained in graduate school on effective communication strategies, to which channels are most effective (Twitter vs. Facebook), to making connections and advancing research. I am interested to follow how the the relationship between social media and science progresses. As future generations enter the field of research, how will the value or use of peer-reviewed journals and social media platforms evolve?

In future posts I will discuss social media and science, and other examples of how scientific content is shared in unique ways online. Of particularly interest to me are infographics, which represent complex data and information using graphic design techniques.

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

My name’s Michelle and I’m a book-a-holic

Martin Luther King Jr. and The Evil Triplets

Observations from the curious-minded science educator by Traci Reid, Guest Blogger

Finding Meaning in Reflective Research

Making Meaning Making Personal

Sharing science through social media

Contact Info