ReaL Earth System Inquiry intends to use the local as a foundation for understanding the global. We want teachers to take kids into the field — the real field and the virtual field. How can technology help to take us there? What should we do when we get there? There are a number of good ways to answer these questions. Some answers are, of course better than others and some the quality of some answers depends on how they are contextualized in the curriculum.
If you visit the Digital Library of Earth Systems Education (DLESE), you’ll find Virtual Field Trips (VFTs) is a resource type. There are more than 100 VFTs in the library. When Sarah dug through existing virtual field trips, she found that many of them were tours, where teachers, or trip designers, pointed things out rather than having students figure things out. We talked about the kind of experience we hope to create for our students as being categorically different from a tour. Or at least the ultimate goal is to get to something categorically different from a tour.
So, we made a distinction between virtual field trips and virtual tours. Now we’ve made another change in label. When a scientist goes to do research in the field, she may say she’s going on a field trip — but she’s probably saying that somewhat tongue in cheek. When scientists go off to investigate in their research area (geographic area, that is), they go and do fieldwork. Ultimately we want our students doing fieldwork. Shifting our label from Virtual Field Trip to Virtual Fieldwork Experiences also avoids the problem that a lot of people already have something in mind when they think of a virtual field trip. We aim to create virtual environments where students can engage in virtual fieldwork (and we’d like them to do real fieldwork too, of course).
One very logical step is to start with virtual tours — many of these are truly excellent resources. You might think of aVFT as something akin to an encyclopedia entry on the geology of a region. You might also use them as scaffolding — as support on the way to inquiry. It makes intuitive sense to me to use them both ways. A well designed tour can provide a model for figuring things out. What we want to achieve through this project is to have students thinking and working like a scientist.
Just turning students loose on a bunch of mysteries likely won’t lead to the solution of any of those mysteries. How much support do you give? How do you gauge when to let students figure things out?
These are hard questions to answer. There’s no clearly established answer (or set of answers) out there, but again, some answers are better than others. A misconception that sometimes derails inquiry instruction is the belief that a factual foundation must laid down before students can engage in scientific inquiry. On the contrary, students are more likely to build a strong foundation of factual knowledge if the facts are accessible by something like ‘just in time delivery’ for supporting their inquiry. The students might find that information using the same kinds of resources that a scientist would. And it should fit into the student’s conceptual framework in the same ways it fits into a scientist’s.
If there’s a mismatch between the fact and the framework, it should lead to deeper inquiry by the student or the scientist. Isaac Asimov highlights this point nicely:
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I found it!) but ‘That’s funny….’ “
Wanting students to think and work like scientists doesn’t mean a major goal is making geologists, but it does mean we want our students to become geologically literate. In fact, we want them to be able to read an outcrop — to be able to construct a likely story of the natural history of a place by reading the rocks. To do that we need to engage them in inquiry, to work with them to develop a heuristic for making sense of a landscape. That might involve something like an order of operations (as suggested by Pete) but it’s probably a little fuzzier than an order of operations. Is Sarah’s graphic organizer an order of operations for reading road cut or a quarry wall? Or is it a heuristic? Or is it something else?
All of this has to do with a recognition that, “Students learn science by actively engaging in the practices of science,” as established in countless research studies. The phrasing here comes from Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8 from National Academy Press. Katy Duggan-Haas (my wife) stated a closely related point powerfully: “Science class should look more like science and less like class.” Indeed.
How do we use any of these strategies in helping our students develop understandings of the natural world? How do we figure out our own order of operations for instruction? How can we tell when what our students are doing is genuine inquiry (even if the setting is virtual)? How can we tell if that inquiry is helping build understanding about the world or about strategies for understanding the world?
