Tamara Ball

The creation of an integrated sustainability curriculum and student praxis projects

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to share the content and early results from an interdisciplinary sustainability curriculum that integrates theory and practice (praxis). The curriculum links new topical courses concerning renewable energy, food, water, engineering and social change with specialized labs that enhance technological and social‐institutional sustainability literacy and build team‐based project collaboration skills.Design/methodology/approach – In responses to dynamic interest emerging from university students and society, scholars from Environmental Studies, Engineering, Sociology, Education and Politics Departments united to create this curriculum. New courses and labs were designed and pre‐existing courses were “radically retrofitted” and more tightly integrated through co‐instruction and content. The co‐authors discuss the background and collaborative processes that led to the emergence of this curriculum and describe the pedagogy and results associated with the student projects.Find...

CHAT-IT: Toward Conceptualizing Learning in the Context of Formal Organizations

This article is intended to spark a discussion between two research communities—scholars who study learning and scholars who study educational organizations. A secondary purpose is to encourage researchers to look beyond schools to examine learning in other types of educational organizations. The authors outline a framework to guide research on the relationship between learning and the social contexts afforded by formal organizations. The framework combines elements of cultural historical activity theory, a sociocultural theory of learning, and institutional theory, which is a constructivist theory of organization. The authors employ preliminary findings from research and secondary historical accounts to illustrate the potential of the framework for guiding research that ties learning to contexts in formal organizations.

How Not What: Teaching Sustainability as Process

Abstract Ever since the word “sustainability” entered public discourse, the concept has escaped definition. The United Nations has christened the years 2005–2014 “The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development” and has called upon universities “to make education for sustainability a central focus of higher education curricula, research, physical operations, student life, and outreach to local, regional, and global communities.” Nevertheless, the indeterminacy of sustainability as a concept has challenged those designing university sustainability efforts, in terms of both campus planning and curricula. Some instructors and campus sustainability planners have chosen to stabilize sustainability concepts into a technical and ethical “greenprint” based on some agreement concerning shared (or imposed) concepts and values. Yet others have realized that this is not a problem to be “solved” but instead presents an opportunity to advance and implement alternative approaches to teaching and learning “post-normal” or “Mode 2” science. This article describes a curricular design that attempts to maintain both canonical disciplinary learning about the techniques of sustainability and training in the reflexive skills necessary to explore sustainable change through post-normal learning processes, which we delineate as three “modes of knowing.” By training students to practice these ways of knowing sustainability, they come to understand the “how” of sustainable practice, process, and design, while allowing the “what” of sustainability to emerge from group interaction in a collaborative context.

Running cars down ramps: learning about learning over time

Any episode of learning and teaching is necessarily situated in both space and time. But, whereas the spatial arrangement of the classroom remains relatively constant, change is the very essence of the learning that takes place within it. Such is the nature of the data to be examined in this paper. The same curriculum unit was taught by the same teacher to a fourth-grade class in four successive years and every lesson in each year was videorecorded. Our purpose was to document change over time at three levels: from year to year, within each year, and over the course of activities within particular lessons. Within the limits of this paper, we focus on one particular issue as it recurred over time.

Reading Graphs of Motion: How Multiple Textual Resources Mediate Student Interpretations of Horizontal Segments

This chapter analyzes interpretations of a graph of motion by bilingual adolescents using multiple representations of motion: a written story, a graph, and an oral description. The chapter uses a socio-cultural conceptual framework, complex views of language and academic literacy in mathematics, and assumes that mathematical discourse is multi-modal and multi-semiotic. Data from a bilingual classroom and transcript excerpts illustrate the multimodal and multi-semiotic nature of mathematical language. The analysis describes how pairs of students interpreted stories of bicycle trips using multiple modes, sign systems, and texts. The analysis examines how multiple modes provided tools for students to make sense of mathematical ideas and how inter-textuality functioned as students negotiated the mathematical meaning of motion through multiple texts (graphs, written questions, written responses, and oral discussions). We describe how four pairs of eighth-grade bilingual students interpreted horizontal segments on a distance versus time graph as they answered questions using a story about a bicycle trip. While students shifted between two interpretations (moving and not moving) of the three horizontal segments above the x-axis, pairs interpreted the segment located on the x-axis as representing the biker not moving. We examine how students shifted among alternative interpretations of the horizontal segments and describe how the graph and the written text mediated these student interpretations.

Formulating the problem: Digital storytelling and the development of engineering process skills

We are exploring whether and how “Digital-Storytelling” can be used to a) attract and engage student apprentices otherwise estranged from STEM-linked career or education pathways b) help student apprentices address the complexities of ill-formed or “wicked” design problems typical of sustainable engineering. Building on preliminary evidence from a pilot 2014 study we hypothesize that apprentices who engage in digital storytelling can gain proficiency in key reasoning skills related to scientific argumentation including: 1. formulating and articulating problem statements 2. anticipating and understanding tradeoffs, limitations and contingencies of proposed solutions and 3. justifying solutions relative to requirements/specifications articulated in the problem statement. Our continuing work is in the development and validation of evaluation and assessment instruments appropriate for evaluating these skills among apprentices focused on digital storytelling and for drawing comparisons against apprentices engaged in “hands-on” sustainable design projects. Our overarching objective is to offer evidence validating digital storytelling as an alternative pedagogy for introducing and teaching STEM reasoning skills to newcomers or “outsiders”.