Tag Archives: theory

Finding Meaning in Reflective Research

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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!

Making Meaning Making Personal

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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!

Promoting Participants as Co-researchers

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Last week I wrote about Bakhtin’s idea that in order to put together a real, full research account, the researcher point of view has to be put in dialogue with the point of view of the participant in research.  Neither point of view is complete in and of itself.  The question I raised was how do we make sure and include the voices of research subjects in our work such that they are co-researchers with us and help create those fuller research accounts of experience.  One of the primary tools for engaging in shared research used in professional development of educators is video.  When we video our practice as educators and (re)view it with others, we create the possibility of real dialogue among multiple points of view.  My own experience working with classroom teachers and museum educators, floor staff, and volunteer interpreters using video to reflect on experience has convinced me that neither my outsider observations nor their reflective writing have been sufficient to create real dialogic relationships where we become co-researchers.  In some cases, overarching cultural and social narratives about teachers and learners inevitably drown out the details of their experiences as they experienced them. In other cases, the details of those experiences defy categorization and reflection.

As one example, in one project to develop a professional learning community among veteran K-10 teachers, observations showed very little evidence of student led inquiry, but teacher narratives about their teaching reported detailed regular use of student-centered science inquiry techniques as part of their normal routines.  Having teachers observe each other using a researcher-generated rubric did little to change their assertions about their teaching even though they were directly contradicted by the observational evidence.  Similarly, in multiple projects with museum educators, those educators report a basic belief that visitors do not read labels.  Putting these educators in the position of researchers observing visitors generated copious examples of visitors reading labels, yet educator narratives about visitors consistently fail to include that reading. The data and observations simply don’t stick and are overwhelmed by other kinds of details or by larger-scale institutional narratives about visitor behavior.

In both instances, we eventually turned to video as a way of creating what we hoped would be shared texts for analysis and reflection.  Yet, the existence of video itself as a shared text is also not enough to form the grounds for researchers and participants to become co-researchers.  Watching video and talking about it, even using a rubric to analyze it definitely helps educators be more reflective about their experiences and to put them in larger contexts than the overarching narratives we tend to fall back on.  But there still seems to be a missing step.

For Bakhtin the missing step seems to engaging in co-authorship to create some kind of new text or new representation of or about that experience.  When we watch video and reflect on it with each other, educators and researchers both come away with a stronger shared sense of what’s happening, but in the absence of creating some kind of new shared text or representation, we don’t have the opportunity for truly developing as co-researchers.  Are there places and projects beyond video that we can do on the museum floor that will help visitors (re)create, write about, or otherwise represent their experiences with us as co-authors?

Dialogic research

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I’ve been thinking and writing today about research participants as authors of their own experiences — or more accurately as potential co-authors with us of the representations we make of their experiences as learners. The problem in a nutshell is this: we are each the only people who can make meaning out of the flow of impressions, actions, activities, and encounters that make up our lived experiences. But when we attempt to reflect on that lived experience we always do so from an incomplete point of view – we have difficulty stepping out of the lived experience itself in order to reflect on or represent it. Even when we manage, our point of view is limited. We can take the point of view of the “I” who experienced, but in order to create a fuller, more complete account of that experience, we also need to be able to take the point of view of others towards ourselves. We need to see ourselves as both subjects of our experience and objects of our (and others’) reflections.
The problem, of course, for researchers is just the opposite. The researcher has access to their own points of view on our actions, and potentially to multiple points of view on our actions, but unless they also engage us in dialogue about our points of view on those actions, their representations are also incomplete at best and simply caricatures at worst.
In either case, we end up with incomplete representations of human experiences: either the outsider (researcher) view is privileged, or the insider (subjects) view is privileged. As Mikhail Bakhtin pointed out in his work from the 1920’s on the relationship of the author and hero and in his work from the 1970’s on human sciences, both of these perspectives tend toward monologue. They tend to be presented as authoritative statements about our experiences that don’t allow much room for interpretation or negotiation of meaning. The end results it is that I am either represented as a unique subject whose experiences are not generalizable, or represented as an object of research whose experiences are so generalizable as to be personally irrelevant.
Bakhtin’s solution to this problem is to base the “human sciences” on dialogue. Specifically, he calls for dialogue among points of view represented by the voices of active subjects of lived experience and active observers who address and respond to each other. But what would that actually look like in a research setting like the Cyberlab at HMSC? How do we maintain both the generalizable aspects of visitors’ experiences while giving room for visitors’ own personal, unique experiences to shape our research, our findings, and our representations of those findings? That’s a question I’ll be returning to in upcoming weeks and one I hope will spark a dialogue here.

What we say through play

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Super Mario moves like a machine.

He almost never turns around unless he must. He runs rightward. He jumps rightward. He crouches and slides under bricks without slowing. He acquires coins. He kills with fire and boot-heel. Still he runs. Rightward—ever rightward.

Finally, a difficult jump briefly halts his progress. Super Mario dies. For now.

My wife puts down the controller. It’s my turn, and Luigi’s. I went from the Atari 2600 straight to the Super Nintendo in my youth. The NES, while much-loved and present in my childhood memories, was not a major factor in my early development as a gamer.

Luigi looks terrified, and far from Super. He hesitates. He backtracks. He pauses. He approaches his first Goomba anxiously, and his jump is ragged and imprecise. The original Super Mario Bros. has somewhat drifty controls compared to its successors, and it always takes me some time to re-adjust. Too long.

Death comes quickly to Luigi. My wife finishes the game a few lives later, with Mario’s triumphant campaign only infrequently punctuated by Luigi’s fitful progress and inevitable tragedies.

Non-verbal communication among players is a big part of tabletop gaming, and I’ll be looking at that as I analyze interactios around my game Deme. However, as in the anecdote above, games—electronic or otherwise—come with their own non-verbal cues and even a body language of sorts. This can be more noticeable when players aren’t able to physically observe or interact with each other.

An arrangement of chess pieces could be interpreted as aggressive or defensive. A player’s confidence and skill can show in online games through movement and action. In these cases, with in-game actions—and sometimes movement—being limited and uniform, interactions come at least partially pre-coded for the researcher.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, and you can see it just about everywhere. I’m a big fan of playing games together with friends and family in the same room, but I’ve often been amazed by how much meaningful information I’ve exchanged online with fellow players I’ve never seen, and with whom I’ve never exhanged a typed or spoken word. Feints, counter-feints, acknowledgements, threats, camaraderie, humor—humans will find ways to communicate with any tools available. In online games, these tools may be anything from complex role-playing avatars to playing cards or two-dimensional spaceships.

Would anyone else like to share an anecdote or two about nonverbal communication within games? The novel ways people find to convey a message can often be just as interesting as the message itself.

On being theory agnostic

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A nice article on some of our current efforts came out today in Oregon Sea Grant’s publication, Confluence. You can read the story on-line at http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/confluence/1-3/free-choice-learning.

One of the hardest things to try to describe to Nathan Gilles who wrote the article (and to the folks who reviewed the draft) is the idea that in order for the lab to be useful to the widest variety of learning sciences researchers, the cyber-technologies on which the museum lab are based have to be useful to researchers coming from a wide range of theoretical traditions. In the original interview, I used the term “theory agnostic” in trying to talk about the data collection tools and the behind-the-scenes database. The idea is that the tools stand alone independent of any given learning theory or framework.

Of course, for anyone who has spent time thinking about it, this is a highly problematic idea. Across the social sciences we recognize that our decisions about what data to collect, how to represent it, and even how we go about collecting it are intimately interwoven with our theoretical claims and commitments. In the same way that our language and symbol systems shape our thinking by streamlining our perceptions of the world (see John Lucy’s work at the University of Chicago for the most cogent explanations of these relationships), our theories about learning, about development, about human interaction and identity shape our research questions, our tools for data collection and the kinds of things we even count as data.

Recognizing this, we struggled early on to develop a way to automate data collection that would serve the needs of multiple researchers coming from multiple frameworks and with interests that might or might not align with our own. For example, we needed to develop a data collection and storage framework that would allow a researcher like John Falk to explore visitor motivation and identity as features of individuals while at the same time allowing a researcher like Sigrid Norris to document visitor motivation and identity as emergent properties of mediated discourse: two very different notions of identity and of best ways to collect data about it being served by one lab and database.

The framework we settled on for conceiving of what kind of data we need to collect for all these researchers from different backgrounds is focused on human action (spoken and non-spoken) and shaped by a mediated action approach to understanding human action. Mediated action as an approach basically foregrounds agents acting in the world through the mediation of cognitive and communicative tools. Furthermore, it recognizes that such mediated action always occurs in concrete contexts. While it is true that mediated action approaches are most often associated with sociocultural theories of learning and Cultural Historical Activity Theory in particular, a mediated action approach itself does not make strong theoretical claims about learning. A mediated action framework means we are constantly striving to collect data on individual agents using physical, communicative, and cognitive tools in concrete contexts often with other agents. In storing and parsing data, we strive to maintain the unity of agent, tools, and context. To what extent this strategy turns out to be theory agnostic or learning theory neutral remains to be seen.