Rhiannon Crain Role: Ph.D, Center for Informal Learning and Schools
Advisor: Rodney Ogawa, Professor of Education
Program: University of California—Santa Cruz Department of Education
Center for Informal Learning & Schools (CILS) Fellow

Institutionalization In Action: Science Center Interactivity And Materiality From The Family Perspective

Abstract

In this study, I brought together historical work detailing the origination of organizational structure in interactive science museums with an activity-based perspective on families’ material experiences at a science center. Bridging the seeming divide between “macro” and “micro” theory and methods was a primary purpose in this work, which took-up a perspective that macro-genetic (sociological, institutional, structural) factors are made in microgenetic activity (interaction, manipulation, remembering, speaking, drawing). Marrying these perspectives gives more power to studies of learning in museums in much the same way sociological studies help us understand the conditions of public schools in the United States (for instance why students sit at desks and attend classes). The often un-examined conditions that inform learning contexts have important influences on learning outcomes.

This dissertation builds off of work in Ogawa, Crain, Loomis, & Ball (2008) and Ogawa, Loomis, Crain (2009) by asking how families visiting a science museum understand their own learning activity as a function of their experiences with exhibits.

Thirty-five families visiting the Exploratorium were invited to “draw the Exploratorium” and to explain their drawings. Analyses of these drawings and video of the families’ discussions revealed that families responded to the activity by drawing and talking about exhibits. Figure 1 shows a word cloud of all the exhibits drawn. While many different exhibits were drawn, the word cloud highlights the exhibits that were drawn more frequently than others. The larger the word the more frequently the exhibit it represents was drawn. There were over 400 exhibits on the floor at the time of the research. Some exhibits were drawn by over half of the participating families, while others were drawn only once.

Figure 1: Word cloud representing the relative frequencies of exhibits drawn by all participants generated using wordle.net.

Exhibits were also represented in different ways. For instance, families tended to draw stand alone exhibits more often and in more detail than exhibits that belonged to cohesive collections, such as those in a well-labeled “listening” exhibition. Figure 2 shows three drawings that give examples of this finding.

Figure 2: Examples of families’ drawings of cohesive exhibitions (in red circles) using simple shapes and word labels contrast with their drawings of exhibits that did not belong to well-labeled cohesive thematic areas. These stand alone exhibits were drawn with more detail.

The contrast between exhibits drawn with a lot of detail, and those drawn with simple boxes or labels suggests that over-representing the thematic element that binds exhibits into a collection encourages visitors to blur their experiences at those exhibits.

Families’ ideas and drawings also showed that the Exploratorium shapes a particular kind of learning context through a purposeful lack of regulative structure and subsequent reliance on familiar cultural-cognitive and normative structures as resources for information about how to conduct activity in the museum. The result is learning activity that depends on both a complex relationship between visitor and material, and on the visitor’s self-regulation through school-like definitions of science learning. In the absence of clear rules about how to measure success in the museum, families’ fell-back on the definitions of successful science learning they were familiar with from schools (i.e. failure is bad, success is the primary goal of activity, or science learning means to be able to recite facts). This suggests that interactive science centers need to move forward carefully if they are to be both science-advocacy and free-choice learning organizations (positions that have a history of conflict in educational contexts). In addition, the study extends previous work on interactive exhibits showing that families value physical interaction as a source of knowledge generation. This finding directly conflicts with critiques of interactive science centers as providers of “gratuitous hands-on interaction” (Bradburn, 1998, p.120).

Research Reflections

How did you end up choosing your dissertation topic?

Leading up to the design of this study, I worked closely with a research team interested in understanding how museums successfully embraced the radical reform of science education embodied in the shift from the classic museum to the interactive science center. Similar attempts to change science in schools have been largely unsuccessful, so why did museums succeed? To do this we traced the institutional history of one of the first interactive science centers, the Exploratorium, and subsequently published our findings in Ogawa, Crain, Loomis, & Ball (2008) and Ogawa, Loomis, Crain (2009). As a compliment to this historical study, my research sought to understand how people actually acted out the institutional structures we traced in history. Coursework in science education on conceptual change turned me onto the power of drawings in research. Sketch-mapping is more accessible for children and less threatening to many research participants who may shy away from being evaluated in educational contexts. Thus, I asked people to “Draw the Exploratorium”. The result was a rich window into how people think about their experiences in science centers. What did they draw most often? What did they leave out? Was there great variation, or surprising similarity across the families’ drawings? What is important about what people drew? How did people talk about their drawings?

Where has your Ph.D. work taken you professionally? Tell us about your current research projects.

I have just started working with the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology on a new Citizen Science Initiative called the YardMap Network. The project is pushing the current boundaries of both social networking and citizen science by creating an interactive social mapping project. Participants will showcase their efforts at implementing conservation practices and be able to explore the conservation practices of others in their neighborhoods, towns, states, and across the nation to develop more complex understandings of relationships between wildlife, plants, utility usage, and other daily practices as they change and unfold across time.

I am also working on a project for the Center for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS) mapping the contours of current professional development opportunities for informal science educators. While a lot of money and infrastructure are in place to support professional development for science teachers in schools, opportunities for informal science educators to engage in professional development tailored to their particular needs and expertise are rare.

What are your broader research interests going forward — what areas do you find particularly fascinating or in need of attention?

I remain interested in the role interactive science centers play in providing an alternative to school science learning for both children and adults. One area of interest is how people come into contact (or don’t) with the variety of informal science learning resources available to them in their communities. I am in the design phase of a study aimed at capturing the “ecology” of informal science learning in a community. What opportunities exist? Who has access to existing opportunities? Who puts them to use? How often and why? I believe the museum field needs to continue to apply sociological/ ecological/cultural/critical lenses to its attempts to shape contexts for science learning. Science centers are a valuable educational resource, but they could be better. A good starting place to help them improve is to begin to understand who is using existing resources and why. We don’t have much solid evidence around this question.

Another area ripe for attention is the confluence of classic interactive learning (hands-on, real stuff, tinkering) with new interactive learning (virtual worlds, simulations, social networking). Learning theories, particularly cultural historical activity theory and science studies, emphasize the role the material world plays in cognition. What, then, does it mean for those materials to be intangible? Science centers place great value on physical experiences (as did the visitors participating in my dissertation research), so how will that core “physical” experience be transformed to successfully incorporate a shifting technological landscape that includes a myriad of valuable virtual learning tools? What does it mean to make non-phenomenological phenomenon phenomenological? In other words, can the stuff you can’t touch be made into good hands-on experiences?

References

Bradburne, J. M. (1998). Dinosaurs and white elephants: The science centre in the 21st Century. Museum Management and Curatorship, 17(2), 119-137.

Crain, R.L. (2009). Institutionalization In Action: Interactive Science Center Interactivity And Materiality From The Family Perspective. (Doctoral Dissertation, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz) 1-258.

Ogawa, R. T., Loomis, M., & Crain, R. (2009). Institutional history of an interactive science center: The founding and development of the Exploratorium. Science Education. 93: 269–292.

Ogawa, R. T., Crain, R. L., Loomis, M., & Ball, T. (2008). CHAT/IT: Towards conceptualizing learning in the context of formal organizations. Educational Researcher, 37(2), 83-95.

Find more references by Rhiannon Crain on InformalScience.org.