Don Duggan-Haas

Drilling into controversy: the educational complexity of shale gas development

Potential development of shale gas presents a complicated and controversial education problem. Research on human learning and our own experiences as educators support the conclusion that traditional, disciplinary-focused educational experiences are insufficient due to the nature of the concepts necessary for understanding the development of shale gas within the energy system as a complex, contextualized phenomenon. Educators engaging in communicating complex phenomena such as shale gas development can also increase sophistication of learner understanding by taking into account the sociocultural and psychological mechanisms that shape one’s understanding of the change processes at work. We therefore review an emerging body of research showing that nurturing environmental literacy requires more than the clear explication of evidence, and instead requires interrogating one’s existing worldview and comparing alternative options for action, as opposed to analyzing energy options in isolation. We then apply the results of this research to the challenging task of creating meaningful learning experiences and engagement with complex issues such as emerging energy systems and shale gas development in particular.

The Posture of Tyrannosaurus rex: Why Do Student Views Lag Behind the Science?

ABSTRACT Todays students were born well after the dramatic scientific reinterpretations of theropod dinosaur stance and metabolism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet, if asked to draw a picture of Tyrannosaurus rex, most of these students will likely draw an animal with an upright, tail-dragging posture, remarkably like the original 1905 description of this famous dinosaur. We documented this phenomenon by asking college (n = 111) and elementary to middle school students (n = 143) to draw pictures of T. rex . On each drawing, we measured the angle of the spine from a horizontal surface. An average angle of 50–60° was found in drawings from all ages, which is within about 5° of the 1905 posture at 57°. This is in striking contrast to images created by modern dinosaur scientists, which average between 0 and 10°. In an effort to explain this pattern, we measured T. rex images in a wide variety of popular books, most of them for children, published from the 1940s to today. Since 1970, a gradually increasing proportion has represented T. rex with a more horizontal back (lower tail angle). Thus, popular books, while slow to change, cannot entirely account for this pattern. The erect T. rex stance continues, however, to dominate other areas of popular experience, such as toys and cartoons, which most American children encounter early in life. We hypothesize that older-style images long embedded in pop culture could lead to cultural inertia, in which outdated scientific ideas are maintained in the public consciousness long after scientists have abandoned them.

The Nail in the Coffin: How Returning to the Classroom Killed My Belief in Schooling (But Not in Public Education)

This chapter indicts the systems of formal schooling and of traditional educational research noting that such research over the last several decades has cost vast sums of money while yielding no discernable widespread improvements in the outcomes of formal education. While recognizing that schools and science education as now construed work for certain things, Don Duggan-Haas believes that they fail broadly if the goal is to nurture understandings of the social and natural world that inform decision making. After growing increasingly frustrated with traditional schooling and teacher education, Dr. Duggan-Haas left academia to join a start-up charter high school. By joining a team building a school from scratch, he intended to change his approach to educational improvement from making schools better to making better schools. The experience instead led him to change convictions further and, conceptually if not behaviorally, abandon the school paradigm altogether and begin a quest for making something better than schools.