EXPLORATORY RESEARCH INTO ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION

AND DIGITAL MEDIA PRODUCTION: A SUBJECT/IVE MOSAIC

by

JOHN MORGAN REID

B.Ed., Simon Fraser University, 1996

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS

in

THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

(Curriculum and Instruction)

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver)

March 2010

© John Morgan Reid, 2010

ii

Abstract

Drawing from diverse data sources, this thesis explores issues associated with environmental

education and digital media production. Working in an interpretive paradigm and developing

concepts through anecdotes, literature study, interviews, and discussion, I invite the reader into a

conversation that includes stories of learning about the environment, about digital media

technology, and about teaching and learning experiences. Foregrounding my presence in this

way envelops the field study and interview data in subjectivity, a tactic grounded in the

theoretical notion of the co-construction of knowledge. The situations and dynamics associated

with learning in the rapidly-changing fields of environmental education and digital media

production are discussed as examples, meant to be used as catalysts for ongoing inquiry into how

these kinds of learning, associated pedagogies, and the institutional arrangements in which they

occur can be better understood. In addition to stories, the thesis includes qualitative research

comprising interviews with two students and an instructor in a university course in which digital

video production was used in an environmental education assignment. The interviews indicated

the technological demands of the projects combined with the practices and choices of the

students may have contributed to weaker self-reported outcomes. The author sets these

interviews in juxtaposition with stories of his own experience to develop concepts and a series of

practical, methodological, and theoretical questions to inform subsequent phases of research into

learning systems, curriculum design, and pedagogy.

iii

Contents

Abstract ................................................................................................................... ii

Contents.................................................................................................................. iii

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ vi

Dedication............................................................................................................. viii

Introduction .............................................................................................................1

An Overview................................................................................................................................... 1

A Note About the Author’s Role .................................................................................................... 2

Icarus and Daedalus: Enthusiasm Using New Technology ............................................................ 2

My Position and Beginning Inquiry................................................................................................ 6

Overview and Approach ................................................................................................................. 7

Embodied Experience: On a Beach .............................................................................................. 11

Wired Experience: Video Editing Crash....................................................................................... 12

Mediated Environmental Education: Engagement Through Television....................................... 16

Fishing for Learning ..................................................................................................................... 18

Embedded Experience: Doing Science, Being a Scientist, Fluid Action ..................................... 20

Synthesizing these Experiences: “Engagement” .......................................................................... 24

Rationale For Interdisciplinary Topic: Overwhelming Potential Of Awareness And Collective Action............................................................................................................................................ 26

Voices in the Conversation: A Subject/ive Mosaic .............................................31

Influences on my Thinking ........................................................................................................... 32Foucault................................................................................................................................................... 32Clustering concepts................................................................................................................................. 35Environmental education ........................................................................................................................ 36

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Learning: cognition and skills in a changing network ............................................................................ 37From culture to practice .......................................................................................................................... 39

Co-construction and Development of Concepts Through Conversations with Students and an Instructor ...................................................................................53

A Qualitative Approach ................................................................................................................ 53

From Theory To Methods............................................................................................................. 56

Rationale for Environmental Education Setting: Guiding Concepts in Interviews ...................... 56

A Field Study Component ............................................................................................................ 58Summary and rationale: conversations-in-place..................................................................................... 58Field site.................................................................................................................................................. 58Researcher’s relationship with site and participants............................................................................... 59Subjects and recruitment......................................................................................................................... 61Methods: data collection focus ............................................................................................................... 61Interviewing procedures.......................................................................................................................... 62

Data and Analysis ..................................................................................................65

Overview of the Section................................................................................................................ 65

Participants.................................................................................................................................... 65

Tagging Interview Data ................................................................................................................ 66

Reading the Data: Emerging Issues and Themes.......................................................................... 68Technical problems: an isolated incident?.............................................................................................. 68“Technical problems”: a common issue?................................................................................................ 70“Technical problems”: impact on learning? ........................................................................................... 70“Technical problems”: preventable?....................................................................................................... 71“Complex problems, complex ‘solutions’”: when in doubt, students improvise ................................... 72“Many tasks, many skills”: prior learning, individual and collective action .......................................... 77“Connections made and missed”: a lack of formal interactions ............................................................. 79

From Inquiry to Conversation: Translating Data into Questions ....................81

From Issues to Questions .............................................................................................................. 83Intention: fit between instructor’s and students’ perceptions? ............................................................... 84Students’ skills: prior assessment and group distribution? ..................................................................... 87Time: awareness of changing skills among students? ............................................................................ 89Synthesizing problem-solving questions into research questions........................................................... 90Practical and technical concerns: containing complexity? ..................................................................... 92Cultures and technologies: choices in participation?.............................................................................. 94

v

Looking forward ................................................................................................................................... 101

Conclusion ............................................................................................................103

References ............................................................................................................108

Appendix A: Assignment Handout ....................................................................116

Appendix B: UBC Research Ethics (BREB) Certificate..................................119

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Acknowledgements

My sincere gratitude goes to my family and friends who have expressed interest in and offered

encouragement toward the completion of this thesis. The affirmation that so many have offered

in hearing the subject of the study has been helpful and energizing. I thank Ted and Nina

Rashleigh for their interest and assistance with editing.

I wish to thank Drs. Peter Cole, Susan Gerofsky, Samia Khan, Don Krug, Karen Meyer, Stephen

Petrina, and Rob VanWynsberghe for their teaching and mentorship. These professors offered a

tremendous range of challenges and inspirations.

My thanks also to Members of the Faculty of Education and the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry

in Education for the supportive environment and the culture of innovative scholarship, and to Jo-

Anne Naslund of the UBC Education Library for teaching me to use RefWorks, which helped me

organize nearly a thousand publications, books, and articles that would have otherwise become a

tangled menace.

To the participants in the study interviews, and to those who contributed to the pilot interviews, I

owe immeasurable thanks. This conversation would not have occurred without you.

Matthew Weinstein’s TAMS Analyzer software was a great help in coding and analyzing data,

and I appreciate the spirit in which he shares his software freely under GNU license.

My thanks to Dr. Ulrich Rauch of the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Arts for

encouraging me to undertake a Master’s degree, and to Dr. Cyprien Lomas for his interest in my

application of communities of practice concepts.

vii

Dr. Stephen Petrina, my co-supervisor, provided me with the honour of rigorous, challenging,

and collegial discussions, shared his positive comments and helpful questions from the start, and

supported me in publishing an article and in completing this journey.

My special thanks to Dr. Don Krug, who has read drafts, provided insightful advice, and

welcomed me as a co-presenter at conferences. Along with giving me the support of a thesis

supervisor, Dr. Krug has shown patience and humour along with a willingness to involve me in

the academic enterprise in a variety of ways. I am grateful for his openness to diverse approaches

to writing, and I continue to marvel at his ability to remove dread and anxiety from the graduate

study process, which he seems to do with ease.

I express my deepest appreciation for my wife, Jennifer, whose patience, healthy skepticism, and

appreciation for balance are only surpassed by her intelligence, creativity, and inspiring energy.

Despite the generous assistance and support from these people and others, I remain responsible

for the content of the thesis, including any errors or omissions.

viii

Dedication

To my parents, Reet Tari and Ian Reid, and to my daughter, Jade, who inspired me.

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Introduction

An Overview

This thesis is somewhat unconventional in format and approach. It is more cyclical than linear,

written in the hope of provoking interest in a new field. Concepts are introduced through stories

and anecdotes, suggested and illustrated more than defined. Problems, and examples of their

manifestation, are not arrived through random sampling, but instead are selected and developed

through a few case study interviews chosen because my position in the institution gave me the

chance to analyze and consider the examples and issues in context. I worked directly with the

students and instructor interviewed for this study, in consultations with the instructor and guest

lectures with the students. Each section of the thesis offers a piece of a wider picture. When

taken together, the juxtaposition of various configurations of learners, teachers resources, and

community represent a challenging distillation of some serious issues educators must face: the

increasing interdependence of environmental education with digital media technologies may lead

to spectacular, almost predictable failure. From these juxtapositions, for example of wondrous

engagement in the environment versus technological paralysis in the computer lab, or of a dead-

end classroom versus a thriving learning community, we can see the future is not certain or

preordained. We shape the way technology is used in environmental education, but we must

realize that the environment is both technological and biological. Our ways must reflect this

principle, and this thesis is one way of exploring what it means to develop knowledge of an

educational ecosystem that includes complex technologies.

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A Note About the Author’s Role

My role as author and researcher is somewhat unconventional as well. I am at times a story-

teller, at others presenting qualitative social science research. My main goal is to convey the

importance of better understanding the ways people work with media technology in

environmental education. I am drawing attention to certain ideas and examples: I select, frame,

and describe some pieces of a picture. I advocate co-construction of knowledge, so while I say

“This is some of my experience and what it means to me,” I hope that you, the reader, will find

connections between the pieces and see analogies and similarities in your own experiences.

Because I have spent years working in a variety of settings connecting people with

environmental issues, often using digital media production technologies in the process, I have

developed a sense that the issues in this thesis are of urgent importance. Yet my experience also

tells me that facts and evidence are not enough to catalyze conversation and change. Stories, as

much as data, seem to compel people to think deeply about current issues, and so it is that my

role: to try to draw your interest through stories first, and offer up a few examples of current

teaching and learning from my immediate recent experience.

Icarus and Daedalus: Enthusiasm Using New Technology

When I was twelve years old, I read an English translation of the Greek myth of Icarus and

Daedalus, in which Daedalus, the father, and Icarus, the son, escape an island prison on wings

they fashioned of candle wax and bird feathers. Icarus ignores his father’s warnings and

foolishly, euphorically, flies higher and higher until the sun melts the wax on his wings and he

plunges to his death at the brink of freedom. At that age, I strongly favoured scientifically

plausible stories, and knew that the sun is approximately 150 million kilometers from earth and

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that temperatures chill with altitude. If asked about it at that age I would have promptly pointed

out the scientific problems with the story and been unlikely to appreciate more poetic or

archetypal meanings in the story. Nearly twenty years later, teaching a computer studies class, I

had a personal experience of what it means to understand the concept of archetype. I opened a

unit on the history of computer technology with the story of Icarus and Daedalus, not because it

was a prescribed or recommended resource, but because my instinct told me it was a good start.

In my mind the myth endures because it warns us that the products of our technical ingenuity can

lead to our demise. This myth comments on human nature: there may be no way to warn against

the harm we can do to ourselves when we enthusiastically attach our fate to the inventions that

we hoped would free us from our limitations, from boredom, isolation, and imprisonment in

banal existence. Daedalus was a wise, old man, one whose lifetime of work as an inventor meant

he had the wisdom to respect the limitations of inventions, even to fear them. Imprisoned by the

king because he knew the secrets of the Labyrinth, Daedalus undertook a great risk to escape

imprisonment and free his son. His words of caution were not enough to overcome his son’s

predictable enchantment with the new power of flight. Icarus died, but the real central character

is Daedalus, whose invention killed the next generation, symbolized in his son’s fall into the sea.

That story underpins my caution about technology.

I wondered if the Icarus and Daedalus myth’s cautionary message found voice in the work of

teachers. I found a fascinating example of the merging of this myth with teaching practices in a

report produced by a group of teachers (McKie, Smith, Milner, and Green, 2002). The report

characterizes their collaboration in making a video which retells the Icarus and Daedulus myth.

They describe the production project as an inspiring experience that helped them see what it

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meant to integrate technology with a number of curriculum areas. They emphasized their

engagement and insights, “the amazing potential” of being able to explore “what it truly means

to learn in a constructivist classroom” (McKie et al., 2002, Reflections section, ¶ 2). The group

reports:

While we were learning about the technology and how to project our vision, each of us also saw the amazing potential for our own classroom with the high level of engagement and links to the curriculum. Filming Icarusaurus together was so much fun because we were exploring what it truly means to learn in a constructivist classroom and we wouldn’t have learned half as much without completing the focused task ourselves. (McKie et al., 2002, Reflections section, ¶ 2)

It is clear from the report that a great deal of work and thought went into the work of enacting a

project-based learning exercise using technology. Positive outcomes in process and collaboration

skills are central to their discussion:

Utilizing technology in telling a story allowed us to be much more than writers and storytellers; it allowed us to be planners, organizers, set designers, puppeteers, camera people, artists, directors, editors and problem solvers- real life skills that will serve us well in future projects. We had to negotiate individual expectations, make complex decisions, use technology to communicate and exchange files, and meet often as a group. Digital video technology helped us to tell the story of Icarusaurus with images, words and sound, in a medium that promotes sharing with others the joys and excitement of our work. (McKie et al., 2002, Reflections section, ¶ 4)

I appreciate and respect the value of those skills, but given the impression I carried about the

myth and its relevance to technology in education, I wondered if ever their enthusiasm was

tempered by the underlying message of the myth. Nowhere in the video or the website was there

a retelling or discussion of the caution message of the story in the context of their practice.

Interestingly, and unfortunately, I think, the very motivation for the new Icarusaurus character to

travel was climate change, an environmental theme. But neither is this theme nor the myth’s

warning—that technology is not an unproblematic solution—reflected in their discussion. I am

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not in a position to explain these teachers’ motivation or analysis, nor is it entirely fair of me to

level such criticism without according the opportunity of defense. It struck me as a vivid

example of an opportunity missed, and drove me to wonder what goes on in the experience of

teachers and students making media for the purposes of learning about something. This group

reports their initial expectations: “We were expecting to learn a lot about technology and the

process of integrating technology in meaningful ways,” (McKie et al., 2002, Reflections section,

¶ 1) and goes on to describe the transformative effects on their understandings of teaching and

learning. “What we didn’t expect was to have our outlook on teaching and learning change based

on what we discovered when technology and constructivism collide” (McKie et al., 2002,

Reflections section, ¶ 1). Their statements struck me as lacking the critical distance of reflective

practice. The group’s report enthuses “Finally, we truly began to understand how exciting

technology could be when infused with meaningful and challenging learning” (McKie et al.,

2002, Reflections section, ¶ 4). What is intended by “meaningful and challenging learning” is

unclear and leaves me asking “what meaning?” and “what challenge?” Apparently the

convenience and transparency of the technology they used was such that “Once we completed

the project we began to realize that the project wasn’t really about technology at all; technology

was simply the means to an end” (McKie et al., 2002, Reflections section, ¶ 4). This statement is

useful in the context of this study because it gives me the opportunity to tell something about my

sensibilities and position. I do not react with shared enthusiasm to such an uncritical claim. I am

seriously troubled by it. I am of the opinion that it is vitally important for educators to approach

the use of technology with at least professional circumspection, and not to transform a positive

individual experience into application in the classroom without the benefit of careful and

collaborative consideration of the potential implications on learning, both positive and negative.

6

In relation to the space of the curriculum and the time available for teaching and learning, this

points to questions of priority, and by what processes technology should be integrated into

teaching practice. This is not to say technology skills have no place in the curriculum, but that

critical technology studies must accompany the enthusiastic teaching of how to use something

that could be misconstrued as “simply a means to an end” (McKie et al., 2002, Reflections

section, ¶ 4). I am struck by their claims about what technology enables them to become, and I

ask what might be lost with such an emphasis on the technology.

I also appreciate the authors’ enthusiasm about the new roles they were able to experience, yet it

strikes me that they are missing something important in claiming to transcend the roles of writers

and storytellers. The Icarus and Daedalus story is about the folly of uncritical adoption of

technology. Reading about the Icarusaurus project reinforces my concern that educated

professionals, any of us, could be distracted by the novelties and challenges of technology, and

spend less effort and time on the responsibility of cultivating prudent awareness among our

students. The lesson of Icarus and Daedalus stays with me: using more technology in teaching

warrants a cautious, reflective approach that draws on and respects the wisdom and cultural

knowledge of those who are reticent about it.

My Position and Beginning Inquiry

I relate the above anecdote to convey my motivation to conduct my recent research. As a student

and as an educator I have had formative and contradictory experiences with nature, technology,

media, and scientific inquiry. In my professional life I have worked in environmental

conservation and education. I have been a park naturalist in Banff and Pacific Rim national

Parks, museum education coordinator at the Courtenay Museum and Paleontology Centre, and

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high school teacher in BC’s Lower Mainland, Somewhat circuitously, I eventually came to work

more with digital media than field-based education. I never lost my interest in environmental

education, but have been making a living in working with academic technology. This work has

included making educational documentaries, teaching video editing, and providing academic

technology support. These experiences have exposed me to an ever-expanding and increasingly

accessible array of media tools. In my position as a staff member of the University of British

Columbia, I held a role for some years that included supporting student video production. In this

setting, I helped facilitate projects and observed students working in learning environments

saturated with digital technologies. I saw students learning about environmental issues using

internet sources more than field studies, and using digital media tools to represent their learning.

I wondered in what ways learning in these contexts compared to my formative experiences

learning about the environment. I already had questions: What does learning about “the

environment” mean when students use more digital technology than I did? Are these digital

technologies a help or a hindrance to learning about environmental issues? Would making videos

enhance or inhibit abilities to understand and solve environmental problems? I decided to

develop a research project that would allow me to pursue these questions more formally.

Overview and Approach

Students have increasingly widespread access to digital media production technologies, as

universities direct valuable effort, resources and mandates toward acquiring and developing

technology enhancements (Smith, Salaway, & Caruso, 2009). Students have been using these

technologies in environmental education. This qualitative, interpretive thesis presents an

exploratory phase of research into what happens when environmental education and video-

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making intersect. I bring together diverse, complementary sources, tracing connections among

them, with the hope of contributing to understanding and informing future research in this

emerging area. The objective is to develop analysis at this nexus of complex sets of disparate and

yet potentially synergistic concepts, practices, artifacts and discourses.

My professional experiences and personal stories have informed my research at all stages, and I

include some of these as major elements of this thesis for three reasons. First, I want to explicitly

acknowledge these as strong influences on my research decisions. Secondly, these stories and

experiences are expository and communicative. The study includes stories of some of my most

powerfully formative educational experiences, as well as my observations from being both an

employee and a student in the university where the field study participants’ project was

undertaken. Variously presented through anecdotes, folded into analysis, and combined with

discussions of related literature, these experiences illustrate my values and biases, serve to

introduce concepts, and convey my priorities. The third reason is methodological. My work is

influenced by the methods and concepts of grounded theory, as presented by Glaser & Strauss

(1967) and Charmaz (2006). Glaser (1978), as well as Strauss and Corbin (1990) point to the

importance of professional and personal experiences in “theoretical sensitivity,” which “refers to

the attribute of having insight, the ability to give meaning to data, the capacity to understand, and

capability to separate the pertinent from that which isn’t” (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, p. 42). I am

comfortable asserting that this is particularly important in my ability to understand and inquire

using the technical and field-specific languages of video and environmental education. However,

I also aim to acknowledge the potential for conceptual blindness, and I counter my immersion in

these fields by alternating my analytical perspective between these fields in the hope of avoiding

9

dogmatic interpretation. In addition, I bring data collected in interviews with students and with

an instructor who worked on an environmental video project. Their contributions are vital in that

they lead my inquiry in new directions, and drive me to challenge and develop my conceptions

beyond my original scope.

My open-ended, qualitative approach does not start with fixed questions nor end with fixed

conclusions. I began with the concerns I have developed over time about the possible roles and

effects of using technology in education, and narrowed the study to focus specifically on

environmental education and digital video making by students. In framing my inquiry, I set aside

my original more detailed questions, and worked from very general questions, such as “what is

going on?” and “what are students’ experiences?” Through pilot interviews I refined these into

more specific questions, which formed the basis of semi-structured interviews. After a long

period of involvement with the interview data, which included transcription and coding, I

arrived at the results of this thesis: more questions. Readers familiar with qualitative research

will recognize these as similar to the early phases of a grounded theory study. As mentioned

earlier, I have adopted parts of this approach, and fully acknowledge its influence, particularly

the procedures and techniques described by Strauss and Corbin (1990).

I had some concerns about eventual generalizability of qualitative research, and these were

addressed to some degree by the argument that interpretation is necessary in any attempt to

transfer meaning from one context to another. Inquiry into a new situation can be informed by

the study of another, but we recognize there is no complete transfer of truth from one setting to

another (Lincoln & Guba, 2000). Validity is in large part a judgment by the reader as s/he

considers its honesty, truthfulness, suggestiveness and relatedness to new situations. A researcher

10

in a new situation can determine to what extent the previous results seem to apply in the new

situation. This is coherent with my preference for understanding phenomena as emergent, rather

than fixed or fixable. I am satisfied with heuristics that recombine and refine data and inquiry in

an ongoing co-construction of situated knowledge that is dependent for local value on local

actors and conditions more than on any declarative or directive external power or cultural

paradigms. This is coherent with the ideas of grounded theory, in the sense that the data of the

local situation informs the successive stages of inquiry. However, I see a limitation in the value

of grounded theory to drive inquiry beyond the particular setting. So, both to provide further

analytical traction and to explicitly present testable challenges, I have incorporated the

communities of practice ideas of Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave (1991; Wenger, 1998). These

ideas have helped me to develop more questions along lines that acknowledge the social,

professional, and institutional contexts of teaching and learning.

As I undertook this thesis, I was both concerned and hopeful about the quality and potential of

collective participation in ongoing processes of meaning-making in a time of rapid institutional,

cultural, and environmental change. By presenting this study I hope to catalyze further cycles of

this meaning-making, wherein students, instructors, and the institutions in which we work will be

better-equipped to adapt positively to these changes, and to use technology selectively,

reflectively, and effectively in environmental education.

The first anecdote, below, represents an anchor: a memory galvanized in an embodied

environmental learning experience unmediated by technology, wherein my cultural knowledge

met the meaningful and comprehensible information provided by the immediate surroundings

through my senses. Some things can’t be digitized.

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Embodied Experience: On a Beach

My most vivid and formative learning experiences have been in real-world, natural settings. At

the age of ten, I walked one stormy November afternoon for an hour or so along the rocky ocean

shore near my family’s home, lifting stones to watch and catch the scuttling shore crabs, poking

in tide pools, scrambling up to peek over the top of a tidal island where I had seen an octopus the

summer before. Eventually I stopped on the beach near our home, my curiosity waning—not into

boredom, but into satiety with exploration. Time for a break from running around and getting

into things. My active pursuit of impulse slowed, and I felt a little hungry. I stood there on the

sandy flat beside a buried rock that rose up to shoulder height beside me, and eyed an oyster that

grew there. In light of feeling a little hungry, and knowing that adults were strangely enthused

about oysters on the half shell, I considered the oyster and remembered a few things I had heard

“It’s okay to eat oysters in a month that has the letter ‘r,’ but not in the summer.” This connected

to something vague about them being more slimy than usual in the warmer months because they

were spawning. I remember something very distinct about the final decision to use my knife to

pry the oyster off the rock and eat it: I knew the words of the rule about months with ‘r’—I was

allowed by the adult world to pick and eat that oyster. But the way I decided for my ten-year-old

self to eat the oyster was based on a feeling, not a rule, and that feeling was based not on some

esoteric psychic oneness with the ocean, but on sensory memory and real-time, immediate, and

vivid sensory input. From the moment I pressed my knife point into the crack between the two

valves of the oyster’s shell, I felt it pulling them tighter together. I knew it was alive, which, for

me, was a good thing. It would be about as fresh as it could be. Once I had separated it from the

rock, I thought for a moment that I should have the customary lemon juice with it, and then

readied myself for what I thought would be a somewhat challenging snack. For a moment I was

12

utterly occupied with sliding the oyster into my mouth, I could taste salty cold—not a whiff of

fish. A few quick chews and a brave gulp later I stood there, and felt some perceptible shift in

my place in the world. There was something about being more grown up, and there was

something about this being another one of those foods that I used to hate until I tried it when I

was actually hungry, and was to like it ever since. But the thing that really struck me as I walked

home was that the oyster was clean—clean enough to eat. And that it was food, provided by the

ocean. I later learned that the oyster was probably Crassostrea gigas, a name I still remember

without reference, perhaps because I once ate one, but more likely because I have remained

interested in marine life ever since those childhood wanderings, when I declared I was going to

be an oceanographer (despite having very little idea that it was actually probably more a marine

biologist that I wanted to become. I have over time learned about the Pacific oyster’s

distribution, life cycle, feeding strategies, anatomy, and environmental requirements. I think of it

as moderately important in aquaculture, and as an indicator species, requiring clean water and

high current flows. The oyster isn’t just a single organism, or a brief adventure in fresh seafood.

It has become somewhat iconic, in a modest way. That clean oyster represents the health of an

ecosystem, and more personally, it represents my first clear and visceral feeling of being fed by

the ocean directly. It represents an abundant and benevolent aspect of the natural environment,

which I have come to value and worry about.

Wired Experience: Video Editing Crash

A contrasting experience, this one with digital media technology, would be inconsiderate to

relate in detail, but it is enough to say that I did learn some years ago that a video editing

application lacking an arcane sequence of software updates, combined with an insufficiently fast

13

computer hard drive, will overshoot its capabilities without warning or explanation in the most

fantastically inscrutable manner at the most inopportune time—eliciting alternately tears and

narcolepsy from my editing associate. I, in grim determination and questionable thrift, elected to

troubleshoot the system with the help of built-in “help” applications, internet forums, and

telephone calls to technical experts. I discovered that while there might be better ways of doing

things in the pro world, our experience was far from unique among regular folks trying to do

things the computer and software said they could do. After seven hours, in frustration I looked at

the blank Google Search field, having run out of synonymous phrases for “Premiere v 1.0

crashes capture Mac OS 9” and thought briefly of just casting my desperate feelings into the

Googleverse. In practical terms I knew better, but then could not resist the curiosity of seeing

whether anyone else had already done something like it. It was a brief and depressing existential

distraction that I do not recommend, from which I learned that things would be very bad indeed

if I actually had to resort to typing a genuine cry for help into an internet search engine.

This was an experience of isolation despite being connected to the “world wide” web. The gap

between my knowledge and skills and those required to solve an obscure problem was

paralyzing. That I was alone, however, was not the only problem, as illustrated by a teaching

experience I had a few years later. It is regrettably not a story of success—in fact I see it as a

great failure on my part—but is certainly a story of learning, and has been influential in my

ongoing concern about use of technology in environmental education. Several years ago I was

connected with an instructor and her group of teachers-in-training, and we arranged together for

me to provide some training and support for a video diary assignment that the student teachers

would undertake. The goals included producing a short video, using camcorders and iMovie. In

14

this case all of the resources, from cameras, to software, to computer lab time, were provided by

the university. After some basic training in setting up for recording, holding still while shooting,

and avoiding the zoom button, groups of student teachers recorded up to an hour of footage. I

collected the tapes and offered to take care of making the footage available to the students for

editing in their computer lab sessions. This meant that I would capture the footage from the

tapes, label the files, and transfer them from portable hard drives to the lab computers.

Everything took more time than expected, from capture problems to file transfer difficulties. As a

professional with experience working with many formats and several editing applications, I was

relieved that I had so thoughtfully agreed to take on this troublesome task. This way the students

would be better able to focus on their reflection and editorial choices rather than on technical

issues. I did not realize in advance how badly things would go when I thought I would be able to

get the footage from tape to camera to computer lab workstations. Each phase took hours. On the

day of the editing workshop, the process of transfer and distribution to the computer labs took

much longer than the two hours I allotted, and as the student teachers filed in, I was filled with

frustration and dread. I was appalled that this project would likely be a waste of time for many of

them. As I anticipated, the process of transferring footage was not complete in time for the

editing work to start. The logistical complexity of organizing footage and people to be on the

correct computers was too much to effectively organize with the group. Functional and logistical

problems took an inordinate amount of attention and time away from the academic work at hand.

With learners in a large group, there is often a limited capacity for providing instructions, and

there is always a range of abilities and plenty of questions and requests requiring individual

attention. I knew these things, and so felt regret and shame at providing this group with such an

ill-organized experience. Compared to my standards of what should have been happening in the

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room—story construction, editing reflective video journals, composing text, outputting to a

CDROM—only a few groups were even able to start. Source files were not on their computers

yet. They could not log in to start the application. Procedures for basic editing were confusing to

some, easy to others. I found myself at one point helping those who could help themselves and

apologizing to the quiet patient group who had not been able to do anything for more than an

hour. The students were remarkably gracious, ranging from supportive to practical. Some

eventually let me know they would be getting on their way and would check in later, others

suggested alternative approaches and workarounds. It was the worst that a mediated experience

of environmental education could be, short of someone coming to physical harm. And it was an

opportunity to experience first-hand how slippage in a few of the variables, like data transfer

rates, encoding compatibility, and computer access privileges turned most of our attention away

from the environmental subject material. Troubleshooting broke the flow of thought and

creativity. As we encountered new difficulties, and as time ran short, an oppressive pressure built

up. Would the students’ grades be dragged down by this failure? Would there be allowances for

extra time? Would it ever become possible just to get working on assembling a simple, short

video?

There were two key concerns coming out of this experience for me: We had invested hours in the

digital video project, and this all but ruled out abandoning it, so we were caught up in trying to

complete it, no matter how stressful the experience or marginal the product. Our investments in

technology extended beyond the wasted hours in that room—they were social and institutional:

the course assignment, the computer lab, the prevailing concern to ensure that students are

technologically experienced enough to compete in a twenty-first century workplace. For any one

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person to stand up and say something against the technology-laden plan would be a socially-

awkward, almost taboo, emperor-has-no-clothes kind of act. There was an obvious problem, but

perhaps people were reluctant to complain too much because of these taboos against

complaining. It is almost as if, because the infrastructure is there, we feel obliged to use it. In my

experience, this does happen. It may be that technology training in education is at least as much

driven by the momentum of compliance to vague expectations about keeping up as it is by

practical or of defensible value to learning. The second thing that concerned me was the level of

difficulty involved in supporting this project for a class of students. The technological

competence available in the room that day was fairly high, but the problems were so diverse and

layered that ever more resources would be required to solve them. More hard drives, more

account administration, more workstations, more network speed, more teamwork, more

knowledge, and ironically, ever more control. To keep a situation like this from spiraling out of

control could require standard applications, standard security and access procedures, universal

identity management, and significant lock-step software training. Would it be possible for a

flexible, adaptive support system to be in place, rather than a completely standardized one? Can

we better understand the technology systems with respect to the needs of learners? So, given the

complexity of supporting this kind of project, I came to wonder what it means to be equipped to

judge whether a technology-dependent learning arrangement is even worth the trouble, and if it

is, how to design it to work for the students, and not the other way around.

Mediated Environmental Education: Engagement Through Television

Rolling back into earlier memories, I recall vividly watching The Undersea World of Jacques

Cousteau on broadcast television. In my memory, my entire field of perception was filled with a

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sense of being there alongside Cousteau and his crew, and this was my introduction to the sea. I

identified with the younger crew members of the Calypso as they explored and filmed in tropical

seas and under Arctic ice. I was completely attentive to the narration of the elder Cousteau as he

explained what I was seeing. My wanderings along Pacific shores were filled with an excitement

that was primed by that world that immersed me in the ocean on a small black and white rabbit-

eared set. I wanted one day to be Jacques Cousteau, and so I went outside. There were no

influences among friends or family that had anywhere near the power of television to draw me

into the ocean world, even though we lived right beside it. A few books, and a few old fishermen

who dropped the odd tip on how to catch things—these answered some questions as they came

up. Mostly, though, it was the nature shows that encouraged me, and showed me that I was

allowed by the adult world, to be interested in the ocean. More than just showing me a place or

thing of interest, the show evoked a sense of belonging with and on the ocean. This worked well

for me. If grown-ups could make a living by exploring, then I could certainly get along

pretending to be Jacques Cousteau instead of the remote yet more typical role models of fireman,

police officer, or airline pilot. An important part of staying interested in the ocean was the social

reinforcement I received from those adults who had great influence on my developing sense of

self— adults outside of my family.

When a neighbour, a research ship’s captain who I barely knew was leaving on a three week

voyage, I nervously wished him good luck on the trip, and said “I hope you catch a coelacanth.”

He stopped, turned around, and asked “What are you going to be when you grow up?” I had the

courage of a prepared answer. I said with ten-year-old self-confidence “An oceanographer,” and

I saw again the same response I had seen once or twice before. I saw the response, although I

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don’t remember exactly what I heard, because the facial expression said enough: Eyebrows

slightly raised, looking into space briefly, the lower lip pushing up, nodding, looking back at me.

A serious, considered, almost grave response. That reinforcement conferred on me a potential

place, sometime in the future, in the legitimate world. From my view, from here and now, that

was an opening of possibility, of one day being part of something, and one day having an

identity as “an oceanographer.”

In contrast to the direct experience of eating an oyster, this television-watching was heavily

dependent on media technology, and, unlike many of the experiences I have had with media, this

watching was fluid and fully engaging, as it is designed to be. But it was certainly much more

than entertainment: it was a vehicle for language and self-concept that taught me about the

environment and the social roles that I could legitimately engage with it. Saying I wanted to be

an oceanographer one day prompted others to connect me with experiences they thought I would

be interested in. So, the show taught me more than a few things about the ocean. It taught me

something of the culture of learning about the ocean, just for the sake of learning about it. I soon

turned to the next obvious place to show my interest in the ocean.

Fishing for Learning

My formative experiences with the ocean were diverse: mediated and real, personal and social.

But few of them were in school. In fifth grade I caught my first fish. I had never seen a fish like

this before and I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t exactly a trophy chinook: more like a

cross between a small shark and a bug-eyed rodent with a sagging belly: Hydrolagus collie’s

face looks a lot like what its Latin name suggests: a rabbit, albeit without the ears. The common

English name is ratfish. They are not prized by fishermen—neither for sport, nor for eating. But

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we asked Mr. Wilkinson down the road, and he told us if we skinned it right away, it would be

just fine pan-fried with bread crumbs and some salt and pepper. A week or so later I caught my

second ratfish. Without any clear purpose, I decided to bring it to my teacher. I didn’t have any

particular questions, and there was no “show and tell” time in our class. I just wanted to give the

fish to my teacher. He directed me to place it outside the window on the roof, and that was the

end of it. Neither my teacher nor that little rural school had structures in place to respond to my

pride and interest. It is likely that some other students had seen one of these fish, and someone

might have had a story to tell about how they or their parents caught them, but there was no

space for this kind of diversion. Instead, we spent hours listening to our teacher read science

fiction stories. Math, Science, Reading, and Social Studies from textbooks and worksheets filled

the rest of the structured time. In that particular situation, the educational and social context was

unresponsive. The culture of the school was not the kind of community of learning that

automatically noticed and nurtured students’ interests. I had been motivated in part by a

television show to go out on the ocean and catch a fish. I wandered the shores seeing thousands

of new things. I walked to school with a strange-looking fish and the open-mind of a child, and

eventually felt ashamed of doing so. Without consciously choosing, I began to cause trouble. I

interrupted the teacher, talked to other students, and alternately dove into class work or avoided

assignments. I don’t remember the next time I did anything in school about the ocean. That

school just did not seem to have ways to connect me and my interests to anyone who could

encourage them. I was used to forests and foreshore, and the school was pavement and bricks,

both metaphorically speaking in its culture and in its physical reality.

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Embedded Experience: Doing Science, Being a Scientist, Fluid Action

The school experience can also be fantastic. This one involved open-ended and largely self-

guided learning, with plenty of room for errors and for exploration. We were to systematically

study a topic for which we could not find existing answers rather than simply regurgitate what

we found in the library. We were accorded a great deal of class time, access to a huge range of

physical resources and ready access to people who were supportive of our roles as students, and

interested in what we were doing. My use of the word “we” here is deliberate; although each of

us worked on an individual project, we all worked in a shared lab, talked about what we were

doing with one another, and shared ideas among ourselves at least as much as with our

instructors. There was something legitimate about our work, and something collective about it,

too. This was the anecdote that really got me thinking about the context of learning.

I had the privilege of being in a chemistry class in which we students, all about eighteen years

old, were set the challenge of designing some kind of experiment to inquire into some kind of

chemistry-related question. This was not an answer we were going to find in the textbook. We

asked: “you mean you want us to come up with an experiment?” Stephen, our instructor, was

sitting on the lab bench with his feet on a stool. He looked around the room and said: “Each of

you comes up with your own question, and then you design experiments to explore your

question. You can use anything we have in the school, and I’ll help you if you get stuck. For next

Tuesday, find a question, like ‘Why is the sky blue?’ and come in and tell me what your question

is and how you’ll study it in the lab. Any questions? No? Okay, then get to work” He clapped his

hands, and as he slid off the lab counter I am sure I saw him chuckling to himself. He was not a

cruel or unsupportive instructor, but he did get some amusement out of seeing us flounder and

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struggle a bit. A day later, I told my father that I was having trouble finding something to make

into a question and experiments. He connected me with a chemistry instructor from a medical

school, who told me about this weird mess that pH meters make if you leave them to themselves.

The pH meters were used in labs as a quick way of obtaining a digital reading of the acidity or

alkalinity of test samples. I had never seen one, but she explained that the sample was measured

by dipping a plastic wand into it, and the meter compared the sample wand to another wand that

was in a reference solution of potassium chloride (KCl). The reference side, if not kept

underwater when not in use, would somehow become covered in powdery crystals after a few

days. It was nicknamed “KCl creep.” I had no luck in books and libraries finding any

explanation, and the term creep often referred to metal fatigue, but never pH meters or KCl or

reference electrodes. It seemed like a good enough question since it wasn’t already obvious and

easy to answer using books. When I talked with Stephen about my question “what is KCl

creep?” he told me I should clarify it and design some experiments. He gave me the OK to study

this question, and made no indication of whether he thought it was exciting or boring, just that it

passed his basic test of being a question I might be able to do something with. In this school, I

and all other students wore a lab coat, all the time. But it was the day I began mixing up some

KCl solution that I first started to feel like a scientist. This was not dabbling or posing, but a

mesmerizing tension. I draped proper laboratory demeanour over sheer amazement as I added yet

another measure of white powder into the swirling liquid in the largest beaker I had ever had my

hands on. I had not systematically designed my experiments, but rather just started from my best

guess: two litres of warmed distilled water took well over a kilo of KCl powder. The magnetic

stirring bullet spun steadily in the bottom of the beaker, and each time I added more KCl, it

gradually swirled into solution. This giant beaker full of warm heavy liquid was mine; I had

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prepared the stock solution, for my experiments. Over the course of a few weeks, I arranged jars

and beakers and covers and dyes for the crystals to crawl over. One weekend I left a half-metre

long glass stirring rod in an open beaker of the liquid and on Monday found the crystals nearly

all the way up the rod. There was inexplicable magic to this strange growth of crystals. It defied

gravity. There was something creepy about it, as if left unattended it would crawl up just about

anything—or anyone. Of course it was too slow to watch, or so I thought. But I tried a

microscope anyway, on the day I was to present my findings to Stephen. I had no explanation

ready. Although I had been able to guess—and, through testing, prove—that evaporation was

involved, my ideas were still incomplete, half-magical and scientifically implausible. Stephen

lurked, or seemed to, in the adjacent lab while I scrambled in my last half hour before I was to

explain what was going on with the crystals. Did they really climb up things? How? And why?

With two minutes to go, I had my first really formative experience with a microscope. I looked at

the way liquid barium chloride beaded on a solid waxy disc of BaCl crystal, and then pulled a

Petri dish of KCl crystals under the scope. I spilled a small amount of KCl liquid, and then

touched it with a bit of paper towel to soak it up. I did this again while looking under the

microscope, and saw the liquid soak up into the towel. Under the lens was a bright jagged tangle

of sharp KCl crystals, filling up my field of vision. Into this I released a single drop of solution,

and it immediately disappeared among the jagged crystals of KCl, soaking its way to the edge of

the frosty mass. Whereas the BaCl liquid beaded and shook with tight surface tension on the

smooth solid BaCl crystal, the KCl drop broke immediately and was pulled into the voids among

the crystals. Stephen came in. I was nearly hyperventilating, half from the pressure of having to

have something ready, and half from the amazement of what I had seen under the microscope. It

was not simply the pure visual effect, which was stunning in itself, but that I was seeing

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something important to my question. I was seeing The Answer. I believe I provided an

explanation entirely satisfactory to Stephen’s expectations, preoccupied as I was with seeming

on top of my experiment. Just before he left he said “Okay. Write it up,” and then paused to look

at the eyedropper, the BaCl and KCl dishes and the microscope. He caught me letting out my

breath. “Good experiment,” he said. I knew it was, because I knew I had figured out something,

and that it was my own work. I later explained the mechanism of KCl creep in a report and

discussed it with the medical school instructor, who was genuinely interested. The experience

was a full success. It helped that I was curious. It helped that I was lucky enough to attend such a

school, to have such a teacher, and an outside contact, and the freedom and resources to design

and conduct my own experiments. When I think of it now, I realize that, in a contained, protected

way, it was an experience akin to the pinnacle of scientific aspiration. Freedom of inquiry.

Discovery. Contribution. Ownership. Recognition.

It was a loosely organized assignment, with simple clear guidance, and plenty of space for trial

and error and independent work. It was also one of the best experiences of engagement I have

had. I was far from alone, and far from isolated. The environment was stimulating in many ways

and presented both plentiful, readily available resources and ready opportunities for discussion.

We had to solve substantive subject-related problems, problems of experimental design, and of

equipment choice and technique. We had access to appropriate technology, and this technology

was predictable in its behaviour, not distracting or confusing. The autonomy we exercised was

balanced with room for observing one another and collaborating loosely. When we were working

in same space at the same time, it was possible to talk through problems, ask questions about

equipment and techniques, and try ideas on each other. It was from this difference that I began to

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consider that learning contexts would be important to understanding how learning works,

especially when independent study depends on technology and techniques.

Synthesizing these Experiences: “Engagement”

Each of these experiences includes varying degrees and kinds of engagement, from the direct,

unstructured exploration of my beach wanderings, to my entanglement in a video editing lab, to

my consuming obsession with crystals and capillary action. When I think about “engagement,” I

usually think about times and situations in which learning is not even explicitly noticed, but

rather seems like it is just happening. I believe that both individual challenges and shared

undertakings can be engaging. Overcoming discouragement and difficulties to accomplish more

than expected is an important way to build competence and confidence. Uncertainties can be

engaging. I suggest there is also another form of engagement, which we could call entanglement,

such as when a technical problem sidetracks us further and further into troubleshooting. I think

this is different from total disengagement, because one is still drawn into an active effort that

requires concentration and presence of mind. So, engagement may or may not be on a productive

track. Disengagement, on the other hand can result from having no idea what is going on, or

what one is supposed to do, and feeling powerless, even oppressed. From my own experience

this is even worse when everybody else seems to know what to do and how to do it. Knowing

how I am doing is engaging: feedback helps, and so does correction. Whether speeding or

struggling along, especially at beginning levels, I find it hard to engage when I am concerned

that I might be going down a “wrong” path. It helps to have others around, but not necessarily if

the ability to solve the problem is vested in only one or a few overtaxed people. Having someone

to check in with may not mean being told the answers, but, on the other hand, being left alone to

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really waste one’s time could be discouraging, especially for a beginner. Engagement, to me, is

more than a cognitive or emotional state. It involves doing, and is as much bodily and physical as

mental. For example, smells, as physical stimuli, are commonly referred to as strong memory

triggers, and can draw one’s entire awareness to a moment. This is engagement: merged physical

and mental involvement in a moment. In my own experience, I associate bodily engagement with

a sense of competence, wherein skilled movements unthinkingly follow intention. The

complementary, cognitive aspect of engagement to me means keeping my mind on a line of

inquiry. This is especially likely when there is no distraction created by weakness in skills or

techniques. If I am thinking about an idea, shifting my attention to an unfamiliar physical

procedure means stopping to think about something else. I am much more engaged when I can

stay on my ideas, and experience the moment without thinking about whether I’m carrying out

procedures or executing techniques correctly. To me, this is an important mode of learning:

engagement means I can experience what is happening, rather than what I am doing. I experience

that which is not myself with immediacy, and the vivid details of these moments are galvanized

into combined sensory and cognitive memory that only later are described in words. Recalling

the anecdotes above, it follows from this working definition of engagement that technology that

unpredictably requires a great deal of troubleshooting attention may interfere with this positive

kind of engagement. Conversely, watching a completed production, such as the Jacques

Cousteau shows, can be thoroughly mentally engaging. As well, it is possible that the process of

making a media production can be engaging with little technical distraction, as I discuss later.

I want to make explicit my beliefs about engagement in learning specifically at the post-

secondary level. Engagement for university and college students is, to me, about developing

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increasing participation in the enterprise of solving real-world problems that are too complex for

any one person to handle. Engagement to me also means that students are expected to join with

and surpass their instructors in their pursuit of insight into the subjects of their studies. Students

should become involved in problem-solving, case studies, and field work. A good example might

be an inventory and analysis of a local system to which the student has access. Perhaps the

instructor could do a more expert job of this inventory and analysis given the chance, but in this

example, the student becomes, for the time being, the current expert. Even if the exercise is

simple, the student is the one who knows about it, and can do the telling. Through discussion the

student and instructor can reflect together on the process, data, and meanings. A student’s

ownership of learning increases and develops through this collaboration because it is engagement

in the sense of merging, wherein the student is included in the pursuit of academic ideals—

learning for learning’s sake—in an exhilarating moment of belonging. Hierarchical conventions

of the institution may even be briefly superceded by this shared focus on what the student has

learned, as the instructor’s and learner’s roles evolve in the moment through this engagement.

Rationale For Interdisciplinary Topic: Overwhelming Potential Of Awareness And Collective Action

Before concluding this introduction, I would like to develop a richer sense of why I believe both

environmental education and the use of digital media technologies are important, and why they

should be considered together. Both subjects are complex, both permeate the educational

enterprise in many ways, and both are potentially overwhelming to students and instructors alike.

It is this aspect of being potentially overwhelming that affects me the most, both personally and

professionally. Both environmental issues and technology systems are especially about

interconnectedness, whether they are thought of as ecosystems, networks or as systems. Yet the

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very interconnectedness that is characteristic to both can lead to an experience of being

overwhelmed, lost and helpless. With either type of system no problem is simple, so even

rudimentary engagement, such as mastering a basic technique or concept, tends to demand a

rapidly expanding awareness of interconnectedness and interdependence. Competence or

proficiency in both of these fields simultaneously likely requires exposure to overwhelmingly

complex bodies of knowledge, physical systems, and interdependent procedures. There is

tremendous irony in this paradox, as technologies are routinely presented as helpful resources for

solving problems, and awareness of environmental connectedness is often described as a key

solution to many of humanity’s problems, yet dealing with either can be an exercise in humility,

frustration, and, unfortunately, eventual apathy. In my own experience, I have encountered

nearly-paralyzing helplessness as I acquired basic knowledge, developed skills, and moved

toward questions of understanding what it means to be capable when working with both

environmental issues and media technologies. In both fields I have had experiences of isolation

and despair, but these were at times mitigated by participation in a wider enterprise where I was

able to maintain communication and collaborative relationships with others working toward

similar goals.

Another experience illustrates a professional setting in which engagement emerged despite a

beginning in alienation. Several years into my undergraduate studies, I was feeling hopeless and

very disillusioned. The more I learned about our vast dependency on petroleum products, the

more I became convinced that humans had little capacity to care about the predictable collapse of

major economies and industrial food systems. I was profoundly worried, and felt increasingly

isolated and powerless. My environmental non-profit advocacy work had been both intermittent

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and exhausting. When, in 1990, I joined the Canadian Parks Service. I felt a sense of hope and

renewed energy that came from, I think, two sources. The first was that I was doing something

enabled and paid for by the government of our country. The work was legitimate and

mainstream, yet enabled me to advocate for sustainability and perhaps persuade and inspire

hundreds of people to connect with and act on their relationships with the natural world. At the

time there was a strong agenda from the government to teach and support environmental

citizenship. In retrospect, this program may have had a significant effect on the popularity of

recycling in Canada. For myself, I was part of a grand enterprise that I perceived to be of real

value, and I found the work to be tremendously rewarding and nourishing. The important lesson

for me from this experience was that I was closely connected, through group training and

ongoing projects, with a dozen or so close colleagues who all struggled with the challenges of

the job and the complexity of the issues. As I understand it, we helped each other to make sense

of the influences and issues that we were embedded in: policies and directives of the Ministry of

Environment, the operational structures of the parks system, the visitors’ needs and expectations,

our ways of crafting communication, and our own individual and professional capacities,

limitations, and styles. In Wenger’s (1998) terms, we helped one another to make sense of our

world and our work. At the very core of what we did were the same hugely complex and

daunting environmental problems that had paralyzed and unhinged me months earlier. On top of

humour, friendship, collaboration, and shared experiences, we had room to be individuals, and

the expectation of professional and personal growth as naturalists. We were encouraged to learn

from the veterans, but also to develop our own styles. Authenticity and personal style were

highly regarded, and the human connections we made with visitors were as important as the

environmental messages we conveyed during walks and talks. In many ways these were common

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characteristics to the conservation campaign I worked in previously, but with the significant

difference of legitimacy. We all served a federally mandated mission of conservation and

enjoyment. We produced shows, sometimes live, sometimes recorded, that were remarkably like

those that I had seen years earlier on television. The messages were emotional as well as

scientific, and the effects on the audiences were often quite astonishing. People often greeted us

after the shows, thanking us for inspiring them. This was the glory and reward, but the hard work

of producing these shows was far from painful. We had at our disposal some technology for

recording and editing images and sound. Our science resources were limited to a small library

and our own knowledge and observations. Yet in the office there was the immeasurable richness

of at least a collective century of experience among the naturalists. We tried our ideas, talked out

our visions, and attended rehearsals and early performances. The trusted collaboration of my

fellow naturalists helped to guide my story efforts and solve technical problems. There was a

media technologist available to us once every few months, but his work was limited to

equipment checks and cursory briefings. More than any other factor, I recall my senses of

possibility and responsibility were sanely balanced. The issues were fairly serious, but they

needed to be embraced with expertise and affection. Even for a relative newcomer, I felt the

benefit of this community, and was able to overcome inhibition about technology and engage for

hours on end, arriving each subsequent Saturday with a sense of pride and belonging that I was

readily able to share.

Being a part of the naturalist community provided a source of security and energy to try new

things and extend the effects of my actions through the institutional structures in which the role

was embedded. It seems that being part of a larger enterprise was helpful for me in maintaining

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balance working with the complex, potentially overwhelming issues that were the core of my

personal and professional values.

These experiences led me to a lengthy search for research already published that would help me

to focus my concerns, and further, to help me find ways of belonging and contributing in an

academic context.

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Voices in the Conversation: A Subject/ive Mosaic

Turning now to a review of literature, I would like to develop a shared sense of my experience

exploring the thinking of others in subjects connected to my inquiry. These selections are

writings that affect my sense of what is important in studying the intersection of environmental

education and digital media technologies. I would not necessarily expect us to agree on the

meanings of these readings. My goal in choosing a selection of writings for review here is to

represent some of the subject areas and ways of thinking that I have incorporated. In a vernacular

sense, I can be satisfied if you “know where I am coming from”. I have made selections that suit

my purposes of sampling significant influences on my learning. This is to say that I present this

literature review first as a subjective mosaic, to convey some awareness of what I encountered

and pursued along the way. My interpretations of some of these works are at times critical. My

selection serves to illustrate influences on my theoretical and methodological beliefs, creating a

mosaic of reflections and concepts but not a concise, fixed statement about them. I have been and

remain reluctant to join a particular school of thought, and so I do not offer a simple label for the

body of works that influence my thinking. This means I am asking you to do more work than if I

had presented a selection that offers more unity. As this is an interdisciplinary work, I have

availed myself of the freedom—and encountered the challenges—of reading from a diverse

range of influences. The formula of a literature review of a field therefore does not apply here,

instead I try to convey why the various selections are relevant to me.

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Influences on my Thinking

Foucault

Michel Foucault’s ideas opened my perceptions about values, norms, and power configurations

in educational systems. I have come to think of educational systems as complex structures,

nested and intertwined networks of connections, flows, and topographies, populated by people

and technologies, structured by social relations and cultural norms. The broad field of education,

with its present rush to ensure students are prepared with technological skills to be competitive in

a global workplace, socializes students in its values and norms, and in my observation, draws

them increasingly into technology-centred practices. Students are pressed to achieve the

requirements of assignments while working within increasingly technological institutional

systems. Foucault’s writings, particularly his “Means of correct training” (Foucault, 1979b)

describe educational systems as historically situated: ie. the values, norms, and practices of the

institution are collective human creations that have developed over time, and will continue to be

developed in the future. Present conditions are therefore not a result of inevitable evolution, nor

are they necessarily ideal. People create them. They are also exceedingly difficult to understand

and change. As I work toward understanding the phenomena at the intersections of

environmental education and media technologies, Foucault’s work reinforces the need for

critique of norms and practices in the institutional setting. This need for critique is based on a

critical premise: if left unchecked, such norms will eventually become dominant without the

benefit of considered forethought.

Students, instructors, and staff alike all participate in the enactment and reinforcement of

dominant paradigms. In the same article, Foucault (1979b) addresses relations and structures in

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modern educational settings, and the mechanisms of reinforcement of norms. The examination is

a technique of specifying and monitoring individual compliance to rules and norms. Individuals’

performances on tests and assignments are graded against expectations. Progress depends on

meeting expectations. The depth to which instructors can be independent in developing these

expectations, and the extent to which students can resist or reconfigure the standards against

which they are measured, are limited. There are repressive, coercive measures to encourage

compliance—a failing grade, with threat of expulsion, or the prospect of not being re-hired to

teach a course— but these dangers of punishment are not the primary mechanism of ensuring

compliance to the values and norms of the system. Repressive measures are not as powerful as

are the range of acceptable options for behaving appropriately. These acceptable options remain

within a dominant set of discourses, embedded in ideologies. It is simply much easier to do

something within the range of normal. Positively reinforcing individuals’ compliance to norms

requires very little direct or repressive work on the part of the institution (Foucault, 1979b). The

grading system, and other mechanisms of reporting, ensure that participants monitor one another,

and also eventually lead to the assumption that one is being monitored. A student assumes s/he

will be evaluated. S/he assesses the range of acceptable results, and attempts to win approval.

This is also true for an instructor. The mechanism by which a student or instructor complies to

certain norms is her or his own choice, in the present moment of the decision, that shapes his or

her actions. One monitors oneself, produces what one thinks will meet expectations, awaits the

grading of the examination, and moves along the educational process to eventually achieve

higher social status. Foucault states: “This is an extremely complex system of relations which

leads one finally to wonder how, given that no one person can have conceived of it in its entirety,

it can be so subtle in its distributions, its mechanisms, reciprocal controls, and adjustments. It’s a

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highly intricate mosaic” (Foucault, 1972, p. 62). There is, in this sense, a dispersed but

continuous authority. Foucault uses the term panopticon to describe a system in which the

assumption of being watched or examined leads to internalized compliance to one’s best

understanding of the norms of the institution. I understand schools as panoptic settings, not only

because of the physical surveillance structures and mechanisms of examination, but because of

the implicit and explicit normative agenda enacted through curriculum, instruction, and extra-

curricular activities. In my own schooling experiences, both K-12 and post-secondary, the

opportunities for compliance routinely drew my energies beyond simply conforming, to

becoming part of the enforcement and deployment of normalizing mechanisms. I have often

noticed myself enacting the ultimate indicator of a panoptic system: internalized compliance to

the point of becoming an extension of the dispersed technologies and practices of subtle,

creative, and situated enforcement.

Relating to the topic of my study, I perceive the increased use of technology and the prevailing

concern with environmental issues to be expressions of norms. Understanding these norms

requires questioning them, and this is an act of non-compliance, of resistance. Even though I may

or may not ultimately oppose these norms, I want to examine them. Perhaps it is good for

students to produce more videos for environmental studies. But I am not satisfied to watch a set

of norms simply emerge, and to watch nascent innovations in environmental education be

stunted by more powerful, yet outdated economic ideologies that drive environmental

degradation. There must be space to discuss what values and what effects are desirable and

undesirable. With the pressure of environmental problems increasing, the practical stakes are

high. I must be able to ask, is this new normal something chosen deliberately? Are we designing

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practices to meet the real needs of the foreseeable future? I need to choose a way beyond

resistance, to enact a different kind of power, sufficient to create space for alternative values and

practices to emerge. Foucault (1972) comments on resistance and power relations in an interview

on the “role of the intellectual”:

What the intellectual can do is to provide instruments of analysis…What’s effectively needed at present is a ramified, penetrative perception of the present, one that makes it possible to locate lines of weakness, strong points, positions where the instances of power have secured and implanted themselves by a system of organization dating back over 150 years. (Foucault, 1972, p. 62)

This comment has given direction to my efforts to contribute to conversations about technologies

and environmental education. I work from the assumption that the system is fundamentally

grounded in values, which are enacted through power relations. The basis of a given assignment,

project, course, or program in an institution exists within a web of social and economic relations

of dominance and compliance. The researcher’s task is to interrogate this reality in some specific

ways, and Foucault is suggesting that the way is to locate power and weakness. In application, I

see a way of locating power and weakness by learning about participants’ activities and

experiences, and by learning where and how problems arise for them.

Clustering concepts

To better inform this inquiry, I undertook to identify and discuss publications that explicitly

addressed the nexus of environmental education and video-making. I found no publications that

exactly matched the issues in which I was interested. Over three years, I have read or checked

hundreds of publications, found primarily through journal indexes, Google Scholar, and library

databases, first using keywords such as environmental education, video, digital, student-made,

student-produced. I then searched the bibliographies of the books, articles, and web pages that

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the first search cycle produced. Repeating this search dozens of times from 2006-2009, I found a

great deal of interesting work, but again, none directly addressing the issues video-making in a

post-secondary environmental education context. The works I have chosen elaborate on strongly

relevant themes, such as environmental education as a changing field, cultural and

anthropocentric biases in environmental education, interdisciplinarity, pedagogy, social learning,

and skills and cognitive development.

Environmental education

I surveyed a variety of writings on environmental education (Bolscho & Hauenschild, 2006;

Disinger, 2001; Zimmermann, 1996; Smyth, 1995; Tilbury, 1995), and selected Tilbury’s as a

vehicle for discussing the concept. Tilbury describes environmental education as “education for

sustainability“ (Tilbury, 1995, Introduction, ¶ 2).

Education with this objective builds upon much of the principles of environmental education in the 1980s, by adding relevance to the curriculum, adopting an issue-based approach, by stressing participation and action-orientated dimensions in learning and by placing emphasis on values education. (Tilbury, 1995, Conclusion, ¶ 2)

She traces the evolution of environmental education from the 1970s, where priorities were in

“environmental studies, outdoor education, conservation and urban studies” (Tilbury, 1995, ¶ 7).

Although these all contributed to growth in environmental education, they resulted in fragmented

efforts due to differences in their origins, traditions, and political positions. According to

Tilbury, the fragmentation of effort detracted from the “prime goals of environmental education,

[which is] environmental improvement” (Tilbury, 1995, ¶ 13). As environmental education

became more holistic, interdisciplinary, and globally-oriented, debates over priorities eventually

converged on

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an agreement amongst scholars and researchers that environmental education in the coming decade must re-orientate itself towards improving the quality of life of all citizens under the focus of environmental education for sustainability.” (Tilbury, 1995, ¶ 13)

With sustainability for the benefit of humans as its focus, environmental education more

explicitly includes social responsibility and brings up a new sense of global citizenship.

However, I believe that there are limitations in this way of conceiving environmental education. I

appreciate that Tilbury’s definition embodies the fundamental ecological concept of

connectedness and emphasizes responsibility. At the same time, “sustainability” is fraught with

anthropocentric bias, and tied strongly the concept of development. For example, a wilderness

area may not need to be developed in any way, but “sustainability” could be invoked to justify

sustainable extraction of wood resources. In order to think about environmental education, we

have to consider environmental education in cultural contexts.

Learning: cognition and skills in a changing network

My understanding of “learning” has changed over the course of this research. I would like to

reflect in my discussion of learning a process, rather than a product. For readers who insist on a

product, I offer the short version: “learning is increasing understanding of and involvement in

social, physical, ecological, and professional systems and networks.” Briefly, this working

definition, connected to Siemens’ (2005, 2006) work has evolved from two descriptive models,

one offered by Benjamin Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy of cognitive educational objectives, revised

by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001), and another developed by Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart

Dreyfus (1986) that addresses skill acquisition in a five-step progression. These models are

somewhat overly structured, and do not take into account the recent growth in importance of

networked systems. Over the course of this research I have been open to the interplay between

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literature about learning and my own observations and ongoing analysis of interview data. The

Bloom taxonomy and the Dreyfus and Dreyfus models were helpful at the stages of

approximating the levels of understanding and skills of the students and instructor I interviewed.

It seemed that the skill and knowledge levels in environmental issues and media production were

relatively low among participants, but the models do not provide traction for thinking about why

this might be the case. When I considered the discussion of learning offered by Siemens (2005,

2006) about learning as (paraphrasing creatively) learning-about, learning-how, and learning-

where (Siemens, 2006) and learning as network-forming (Siemens 2005), I was struck by the

richness of the his assertion that

the process is one of coming to know, rather than of knowing. The developing structure of technology, neural research, institutional reorganization (from hierarchy to network), and social impact of learning under new ideologies, is evolving too rapidly to be effectively detailed as “this is what it is”. The moment this declaration is made, the environment has shifted. Learning is an in-process activity. (Siemens 2005, pp. 26-27)

By considering both structured ways of thinking about learning as well as messier and less

authoritative ideas about networks I saw that the stories of my own experiences and those of

interview participants presented an opportunity that resonates with the idea of learning as

process. I first used Bloom’s taxonomy, and the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model of skills acquisition

as a way of taking a provisional snapshot: what are the knowledge and skill levels of these

individuals? This led me to think of the networks or systems in which they were working and

learning, and rather than use these structured models to emphasize factual claims about

individuals’ learning, I began to think about the skill and knowledge levels of the systems-as-

composite-entities of which we are all a part. Siemens’ ideas of learning as network-forming

process, taken as context for the learning of both the individuals and of the system as a whole

pointed to the focus of this study into the interactions and relations of learners, instructors, with

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their institutional social ecological, and professional contexts. Through the lens of the Bloom and

Dreyfus and Dreyfus models, the level of knowledge and skill both within this institution and

within this study seems to me quite rudimentary. But there is value in recognizing that there may

be a great deal to learn. From here, the process is to learn more, to learn how to extend network

involvement in ways informed by the insight and wisdom of all related communities. This is

discussed more later in this thesis in terms of developing ecological knowledge, which is perhaps

the crucial kind of learning for the temporal purposes at hand.

From culture to practice

Bowers

At its core, Bowers’ (1993) book, Critical Essays on Education, Modernity, and the Recovery of

the Ecological Imperative, is about the identification of deep culturally- and ideologically-based

problems in mainstream Eurocentric, liberal educational institutions that underpin ecological

problems. Bowers points to ways in which taken-for-granted assumptions serve to obscure the

complicity of liberal education’s role in reinforcing the harmful cultural metaphors that

“underpin the dominant technicist, consumer, individualistic, middle-class culture” (Bowers,

1993, p. 170). Bowers’ book is a cultural discourse analysis that strives to expose problematic

technologies and metaphors, and dominant linguistic and cultural patterns, that relate directly to

the ecological crises humanity faces. Bowers tells of his attempts in his institution to

“reconstitute the epistemological foundations that led to an industrial model of teacher

education” (Bowers, 1993, p. 166). He points out a number of problems in teacher education,

notably in his twelfth chapter, wherein he emphasizes that ecological crises are coinciding with

growing awareness of cultural and ethnic identities because they are related to disenchantment

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with the illusory promises of modern forms of consciousness, such as individualism and personal

success (Bowers, 1993, p. 163). The impacts on cultural groups and environments alike are

becoming pressing issues, traceable to the

Eurocentric mind-set, with its human/nature dichotomy, its emphasis on competitive individualism and technological/economic practices, and its experimental approach to ideas and values guaranteed by a belief that change is inherently progressive. (Bowers, 1993, p. 164)

Bowers goes on to identify the main areas of misunderstanding. He points out that teachers act to

transmit cultural norms, but do not teach awareness that their characteristics and assumptions

exist among many possibilities. Teachers also need to understand that scientific methods and

mainstream cultural understandings must be questioned and supplemented, if not wholly

replaced, to deal with ecological problems on an effective scale. Further, teachers may fail to

recognize how their use of language serves to transmit cultural norms, not just through the

explicit messages, but through the encoding schemes within language that carry meanings

through their structural and metaphorical patterns. Multicultural perspectives could prompt more

ecologically sound thinking and sustainable practices by including more root metaphors that

enrich and inform rather than deplete our ecological relationships. He contends teachers tend to

support the notion of technology as a neutral expression of modern progress, reinforcing

blindness toward cultural diversity and toward the harmful effects of technologies (Bowers,

1993, p. 172). Bowers offers that environmental education can implement the “deep cultural

changes” (1993, p. 196) needed to re-orient education toward a sustainable future. His strategy

has four phases: understanding facts about environmental problems, bringing these facts into

culturally-situated educational settings, challenging the assumptions of conventional analysis,

and looking for opportunities to recognize, experience, and value minority cultures’ ecologically

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sustainable patterns, practices, and values. For Bowers, modern education is a deeply flawed,

outmoded, and destructive cultural entity that needs to change. Education must adapt before its

destructive unsustainable ways destroy everything including itself.

I am not quite ready to cast contemporary education as a monolithic entity but I do agree that

much of contemporary education is part of a configuration of normalizing apparatuses. Bowers

also risks the pitfall of essentializing minority cultures as being well-stocked with handy

metaphors in their sustainability-minded cultures. The value of his point, though, is that

homogeneity of culture is actually dangerous, and that education can tend to promote

homogeneity. If education ignores or displaces a diversity of methaphorical ecological insights,

grounded in diverse languages and cultures, with a narrower selection from Euro-American

anthropocentric discourses, there will be a crucial loss of an implicit sense of relatedness to the

natural environment. Bowers’ ideas resonate with my concerns about using video to learn about

the environment. Bowers warns us that the ever-expanding curriculum of technological

competency within the context of modern education threatens to overwhelm or displace

environmentally-focused learning. Becoming competent with digital media technology might

require becoming entangled in a sub-culture having its own imperatives and pressures that can

displace other kinds of knowing.

Russell and the voice of nature

I would like to bring in some recent research that discusses the voice of nature. Voice is a critical

issue in both environmental education and videography. Russell (2005) expresses concern about

the near-absence of the voice of nature in environmental education research. One of the problems

mentioned is that “nature” remains largely in the domain of the natural sciences, “thereby

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leaving the social sciences free to focus on humans” (Russell, 2005, p. 434). Russell notes that

this situation is not total, and that there has been some writing indicating “‘nature’ is understood

as a cultural production” (Russell, 2005, p. 434). Most postmodernist approaches to “nature” are

problematic, she argues, as they tend to first recognize “nature” as a social construction, only to

abolish these constructions as outdated metanarratives (Russell, 2005, p. 435). Toward an effort

to deal with these difficulties, Russell introduces the important concept of co-construction of

knowing, which I understand as a collective process of meaning-making, to ask if all co-

constructors need necessarily be human. “Is there any room here for ‘nature’ as co-constructor?”

(Russell, 2005, p. 435). Despite the limited capacity of a human to reliably and legitimately fill

the role of interlocutor, Russell (2005) argues that, when humans represent nature, there is an

ethical imperative to somehow include nature’s voice. In this role, we are shaped in our thinking

and action by our physical characteristics, and so must engage the question of “who, or what,

draws our attention and is deemed worthy of representation in the first place?” (Russell, 2005,

p. 437). She further argues for structuring spaces for multiple voices, including the non-human,

to participate or intrude as the case may be. These voices for non-human representation may be

in media other than written texts, movement, music, and film, (all of which are produced by

humans) (Russell, 2005, p. 438). I think of vocalizations, markings, and other traces produced by

living and non-living beings that we often just call phenomena, but which could be read by

humans as richly communicative languages in themselves. She further suggests we consider

narratives of other animals within ethically and ecological appropriate contexts, and consider the

human subject non-hierarchically among all beings (Russell, 2005, p. 439).

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Russell’s concerns about the voice of nature are perhaps the most esoteric and challenging to

incorporate, as they are to me less about verbal arguments than about space and openness to

perception and experience. As I understand it, an ethical approach to conveying nature’s voice

requires concrete descriptions of ecologically situated details rather than abstract arguments.

Communicating these details leads to co-construction of meaning between what nature has to say

and what a reader understands. My own narrative of eating an oyster on a beach mediates the

voice of the ecosystem which produced the oyster: the oyster’s location and condition, for

example, are words in nature’s language. When I chose to eat the oyster, I recalled the words of

adults about when it was okay to eat them, but it was the feel and smell of the oyster, the

freshness of the sea, and my own hunger that spoke to me in the moment. These are, to me,

highly communicative of meanings of relatedness and interdependence. We learn also of the

subtlety of nature’s voice, in that we can so often defeat its non-verbal messages with our

technologies. For environmental education, respecting and conveying nature’s voice is challenge

enough. In environmental education using media-making technology, conflicts between nature’s

voice and the demands of the technology may become a pitched battle.

Technology and sustainability education: Elshof

Shifting focus, I would like to discuss an article that considers educational disciplines, situations

and practices, and argues for interdisciplinary collaboration involving technology and

sustainability education. Elshof’s (2003) article is primarily concerned with the need for

environmental and sustainability issues to inform and be integrated into interdisciplinary studies

in secondary education, especially in technology studies. The secondary context is relevant to my

study because secondary experiences shape skills and knowledge of students coming into the

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early post-secondary courses. Further, I am developing my own sense of possibility for

integrating the two disciplines, and articulation between secondary and early undergraduate

studies is a part of this interest. Finally, his analysis of relations among disciplines seems to me

well-suited to post-secondary studies because of the level of sophistication in his arguments.

Elshof argues that

much more work needs to be done within secondary education to integrate science, geography, business, and technology education in order to help young people develop the interdisciplinary perspectives and problem-solving skills they will require to confront the thorny issues of sustainability. (Elshof, 2003, p. 166)

The failure of the provincial school system, in which he works, to effectively integrate

sustainability issues into education is contrasted with the significant potential of technology

studies to support this need. Elshof’s disappointment with the school system is clear, but

rationally expressed. He names technology studies as a discipline that has “the potential to help

students envision, design, and construct a more sustainable built world” (Elshof, 2003, p. 166).

Elshof develops the idea that it is through integration of studies that students can move through

stages of knowledge and skills development, from information-gathering, to problem-solving, to

critical engagement. Environmental and sustainability studies are

examples of new [hybrid] academic discourses, whose general epistemological characteristics…indicate a movement

• from segmentation to boundary crossing and blurring • from fragmentation to relationality • from unity to integrative process • from homogeneity to heterogeneity and hybridity • from isolation to collaboration and cooperation • from simplicity to complexity • from linearity to non-linearity • from universality to situated practices (Elshof, 2003, p. 167)

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These evolving, hybrid discourses can be embodied in interdisciplinary approaches that serve

sustainability and environmental education. Complex relationships, analyzed from multiple

viewpoints, through both positivist scientific and humanistic approaches, are the appropriate

subjects of environmental and sustainability research. Team learning is a necessary aspect of

interdisciplinary approaches, which ideally facilitate progression from individual “islands of

knowledge,” (Elshof, 2003, p. 169) toward both broader and more critical awareness,

appreciation, and understanding of interests, perspectives, problems and possible solutions

(Elshof, 2003, pp. 168-169). Elshof notes a shortage of existing critical curriculum on the

subjects of extractive activities, waste, resource use, human needs. He contrasts this shortage

with the overabundance of cultural and formal learning by which students are directed to become

vigorous consumers. This imbalance leads to inadequate development of students’ critical

faculties (pp. 170-173). Elshof calls for collaborative connections between environmental and

technology education that will help students learn how to create technologies for a more

sustainable world (pp. 176-179). He concludes with a short list of questions which technology

education should engage.

• Is how I live and what I do compatible with the right to life of others? • Does it or does it not steal basic resources from them? • Does it or does it not despoil their environment? (Elshof, 2003, p. 181)

Elshof’s technology education questions are recognizable as environmental education questions:

he is advocating bringing environmental education into technology studies. I wonder if this

interdisciplinary integration goes well in the other direction. In practical terms, how could

technology studies interact with environmental studies? Would the use of more technologies

improve the insight, data richness, and communication abilities of students dealing with complex

environmental issues? How, if at all, would nature’s voice be mediated? Or would students be

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required to learn so much about the technologies that they might learn less about the

environmental issues? It seems to me to be sensible that technology and environmental studies

inform one another. Environmental education studies should include highly-developed

understanding of the effects of many kinds of technologies on our own and other species’ lives.

Despite the apparent potential for synergy between these disciplines, I have long wondered if

integrating technology and environmental studies may have pitfalls as well as benefits. I have

found some evidence of these in my research. As we shall see, the students’ and instructor’s

accounts collected for this research suggest that implementing the idea of interdisciplinary

integration may not be easy, and understanding the potentials and dynamics of this curriculum

decision requires much more work.

Meaningfulness of learning involving video: Karppinen

Although not directly involving environmental education, Karppinen’s (2005) article focuses on

characteristics of effective learning involving video. She suggests that learning using videos is

meaningful when it is “(a) active, (b) constructive and individual, (c) collaborative and

conversational, (d) contextual, (e) guided, and (f) emotionally involving and motivating”

(Karppinen, 2005, p. 236). I briefly discuss this article as it intersects with my study’s focus and

draws attention to the social aspects of teaching and learning using video. She argues that the

subject material is not simply stored in and extracted from video footage, but rather that learning

is a socially-mediated experience among the teacher and students. “Simply putting pupils around

a computer to work together will not automatically result in a pedagogically-meaningful

collaborative construction of knowledge” (Karppinen, 2005, p. 240). The instructor ideally

pursues a dynamic balance between structured guidance and supported student freedom to create

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their own knowledge and construct their own understandings. Instead of doing whatever it takes

to support students’ success with the technology or the material, she expects to guide them

toward challenges as well as solutions, under the principle that “guiding pupils only to further

enhance their strengths is not a valid educational strategy” (Karppinen, 2005, p. 239). Karppinen

(2005) writes “A pedagogically meaningful use of videos is one in which the learner resorts to

collaboration and conversation” (Karppinen, p. 240). Her comments are relevant to my interests:

When teaching environmental education through video-making, how is the balance between

guidance and challenge maintained? When is learning inhibited by too much freedom or too

much challenge? Karppinen’s ideas remind me of the unpredictable nature of both technology

and project work. I recall my own troubleshooting traumas with video-editing, and my own

struggles with writing. These are first-hand experiences of too much challenge and not enough

guidance. The interview participants’ who contributed to this study describe some experiences

that are their own examples of such imbalance.

Situated learning and communities of practice

Some ideas influencing my analysis of this study’s observational and interview data come from

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991; Wenger, 1998). In their collaborative book Situated

Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Lave and Wenger (1991) articulate the

implications of learning that “is a process that takes place in a participation framework, not in an

individual mind” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 15). They describe learning as a transformative

process of developing identity, so that developing competence is not simply a matter of learning

skills, but is a part of becoming a person who belongs, in a socially-situated role. The role

includes competence, relationships, access to resources, and gradually increasing participation in

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the enterprise of the community. In Situated Learning, Lave and Wenger offer case studies of

midwives, tailors, butchers and others engaged in learning the ways of their trades, and describe

the unofficial social structures and patterns as well as those stages and phases that are explicitly

acknowledged as identifiers of movement toward full participation as experienced members of

their practice, so that

the person has been correspondingly transformed into a practitioner, a newcomer becoming an old-timer, whose changing knowledge, skill, and discourse are part of a developing identity—in short, a member of a community of practice. (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 122)

Lave and Wenger offer that the notion of “legitimate peripheral participation” is a way of

understanding how individuals and groups learn, as newcomers become part of communities of

practice. Individuals and the whole community of practice are pursuing shared purposes: they are

solving problems in their work, they are adapting the existing objects and processes of the

practice to current circumstances, and they are making sense of their own experiences and places

in the community. Lave and Wenger’s ideas present an inviting set of possibilities for developing

my understanding of students making media in environmental education contexts. I struck me

that my analysis could be enriched by considering my participants’ involvement with various

communities of practice. One of the concerns and opportunities for analysis I had early decided

on for this study was students’ access to the resources needed to support their learning.

Traditional resources, such as assignment handouts, reference lists, readings, lecture notes,

library books and internet searches were not anywhere near representative of the total context in

which students learned. Soon after my initial review of the interview data I realized I perceived

the university as a rich environment for learning. I also realized that this environment was not

necessarily accessible to the students I interviewed. This could be important, since in Lave and

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Wenger’s view, access to resources is of crucial importance to participation and learning (Lave

& Wenger, 1991, p. 114). Rather than learning being an experience of classroom learning in a

conventional sense, the authors insist

that exposure to resources for learning is not restricted to a teaching curriculum, and that instructional assistance is not construed as a purely interpersonal phenomenon, rather … that learning must be understood with respect to a practice as a whole, with its multiplicity of relations—both within the community and with the world at large. (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 114)

This means, in practical terms, that the design and practice of supporting learning must include

strategies that include student access to appropriate members and other resources of the

communities of practice with which their learning is associated in reality, not just in curriculum

guidelines and lecture notes. The implications are significant, for if this is true, educators must

better understand not just the subject material, but the present state of the practices related to

students’ learning in rich, current, personal, and complex ways. Further, it is not therefore up to

just the instructor to write a syllabus and a course of studies with appropriate assessment.

Successful participation requires that the instructor, the institution, and relevant communities of

practice make students aware of their learning expectations, and connect them with a range of

opportunities to participate, collaborate, observe, and practice with other learners and mentors

All involved, including the institution, instructors, fellow learners, and the student him- or

herself must recognize this participation as mandated, valued, and central to students’ learning—

that is to say legitimate. For example, the grade five student who brings a strange fish to school

needs to know which teachers might be interested in fishing, boats, biology, taxidermy, or

whatever study, or other practice that can be seen by the student and other members of that

school community as legitimate. Similarly, students learning to use digital media, would find

great value in interacting with professionals to create short documentaries. Practical questions

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occur, but are embedded in the context of discussion of what makes a good story, and how to

access and make sense of a situation that is worth telling about. Students want to produce good

work, and, it seems to me, are likely to experience technical instructions as largely noise when

their pressing concern is what message they have to offer.

Situated learning as identity development also suggests to me that what students are learning

becomes more layered and complex as they develop skill with the technology, as the cameras

and computers and software become useful to their pursuit of a communication goal rather than a

hindrance to a purposeless exercise. Even if the learners are not training to become professionals

like the mentors with whom they interact, they may gain motivation from these interactions. In

the words of Lave and Wenger, “Legitimate peripheral participation moves in a centripetal

direction, motivated by its location in a field of mature practice. It is motivated by the growing

use-value of participation” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 122). Lave and Wenger’s ideas in Situated

Learning increased my interest in thinking about my study participants’ reported experience in

terms of legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice.

Wenger’s subsequent book Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (1998)

extends the ideas originally presented in his earlier collaboration with Lave. One of the

fundamental issues of social theory, that of the interactions between structures and individuals, is

addressed here with application to learning. Wenger emphasizes that learning is a social

phenomenon taking place in communities of practice, through processes of identity development,

as part of a shared enterprise in which structures and individuals are mutually constitutive. In

Communities of Practice, Wenger develops a descriptive and analytical approach and provides a

theoretical framework for applied analysis and design. Key ideas in the text include:

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• The concept of practice as both constitutive and a result of collective learning through doing

• the meaning of identity as a transformative process toward knowing, competence, and belonging

• meaning as dual process of reification and negotiation • community as a result of mutual engagement, joint enterprise, shared repertoire,

and mutual negotiation of meaning in practice. (Wenger, 1998)

Identifying just what is a community of practice (CoP) requires more than an assumption of

social harmony in the vernacular sense of community. Wenger offers criteria for characterizing

CoPs, and these suggest some interesting implications about relations among learners and about

technology. Wenger writes “connotations of peaceful coexistence, mutual support, or

interpersonal allegiance are not assumed, thought they may exist in specific cases” and “Most

situations that involve sustained interpersonal engagement generate their fair share of tensions

and conflicts. In some communities of practice, conflict and misery can even constitute the core

characteristic of shared practice” (Wenger, 1998, p. 75). Acknowledging that communities of

practice can be places of struggle widens the range of systems that can be called communities.

Rather than claim that all groups of interacting persons are communities of practice, Wenger

specifies that participants in a community of practice, whether newcomers or old-timers, engage

with one another, discuss problems, and share their ideas and complaints in an effort toward

common goals. Wenger (1998) calls this “joint enterprise,” which he describes as “the result of a

collective process of negotiation” (p. 77). The negotiation process itself is defined by the

participants as they mutually negotiate ways to respond to their situation (Wenger, 1998, p. 77).

Lave and Wenger’s ideas of “situated learning” and “communities of practice” contributed a

basic perspective to my inquiry into environmental education and media-making. From these

authors’ influences I decided to study learners in contexts, paying attention to what they were

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trying to do, what they actually did, and with whom they interacted. As Lave and Wenger would

have surely expected, the contexts and communities were to became an important focus.

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Co-construction and Development of Concepts Through Conversations with Students and an Instructor

A Qualitative Approach

There are a number of motivations for my decision to approach this study qualitatively. The

basic logic of the decision is that I would like to identify some concepts and questions that might

be important in a relatively unstudied intersection of fields, and I see a qualitative approach as

more productive and descriptive of these than a quantitative study would be. I advocate a

qualitative interpretive approach to exploratory research because it allows room to consider

many forms of data, to hear stories, to find out what factors are at play, to include the

perspectives, biases, and insights of the researcher, and to find out what questions are important.

To approach a new topic without qualitative exploratory research would be to ignore the

possibility that there are new questions to be asked.

My motivation for this study is partly rooted in a sense of concern and responsibility for our

natural world and our place within it. These are ethical, social, and scientific considerations, to

be sure, but also quite personal and unavoidably political. I believe there are issues of values,

practices and of culture to be dealt with, for example, whether there is any place at all for digital

media technology in environmental education is a question of values that must be exposed before

any measurements are taken of how “effective” these technologies might be. Along these same

lines, I want to foreground the awareness that cultures and practices in education are not simply

incidental happenstance, but they are created based on values. Doing qualitative research

supports alternatives to positivist paradigms. I advocate being open to alternatives to the

mechanistic and reductionist knowledge systems that have dominated scientific, political, and

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educational cultures for just long enough to correlate remarkably closely with the emergence of

massive environmental and social problems. Science, rooted in the positivist paradigm, has

dominated educational and environmental policy decision-making for much of this time as well,

all the while carrying a cloak of objectivity and impartiality. Qualitative research has the

potential to acknowledge and expose subjectivity and partiality, even to celebrate them.

The underlying values of this research are in agreement with Denzin, Lincoln, and Giardina,

(2006), who advocate “a methodology of the heart, a prophetic, feminist postpragmatism that

embraces an ethics of truth grounded in love, care, hope and forgiveness ” (Denzin, et al, 2006,

p. 770). It is my belief that this methodology looks like conversation, in which stories, reflecting

characters, voices, values, concerns, and morals, are followed by discussion along the lines of

“this is what happened to me,” “this is what I did,” and “this is what I want to do. What do you

think?” The process is collective, iterative, and reflective, and generative of new meanings and

new configurations and actions. That is the basis for my choice to pursue this research through

qualitative means first.

I advocate a qualitative approach grounded in a concern for exposing and countering

assumptions that may be inherent in pro-science, pro-engineering, and pro-technology

paradigms. I see this methodology, enacted through co-construction of knowledge and generative

of collaborative action, as a moral alternative to science-based empiricism. This reflects what

Denzin et al (2006) describe as a post-pragmatist view, in which

there is no neutral standpoint, no objective God’s-eye view of the world. The meaning of a concept or a line of action or a representation lies in the practical, political, moral and social consequences it produces for an actor or collectivity. The meanings of these consequences are not objectively given. They are established through social interaction and the politics of representation. (Denzin et al, 2000, p. 776)

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The meaning or value of truth and knowledge claims can then be interpreted through dialogue on

experience and specific ethical considerations. Collins (cited in Denzin et al, 2006) offers four

criteria: “primacy of lived experience, dialogue, an ethics of care, an ethics of responsibility” as a

“framework [that] privileges lived experience, emotion, empathy and values rooted in personal

expressiveness” (p. 776). Research grounded in compassion demands insight into the effects of

technologies on vulnerable people, including the students who put their trust in educators to

provide them with measured, appropriate challenges. In my practice, this framework becomes

research comprising stories, feelings, values, personal viewpoints, and efforts to understand and

respect the existences of all beings.

At the beginning of this research, I had no idea what questions to ask that would be suitable to a

quantitative study, and so I pursued qualitative interpretive research and brought the assumption

that the world is complex and ever-changing, rather than fixed and authoritatively measurable.

As Denzin et al (2006) point out, some critics of qualitative methodologies “presume a stable,

unchanging reality that can be studied with the empirical methods of objective social science.

They seek to preserve this stable, unchanging—and imaginary—world against the attacks from

the inside and the outside” (p.772). I situate my work in a framework that “seeks to contextualize

shared values and norms,…privileges the sacredness of life, human dignity, non-violence, care,

solidarity, love, community, empowerment, civic transformation [and] demands of any action

that it positively contribute to a politics of resistance, hope and freedom” (Denzin et al, 2006, p.

776). I am hoping to advocate and catalyze action toward assessing, and if necessary, freeing

learners from a possible overload of digital demands. I am aiming to resist my own complicity in

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the deployment of technology in environmental education, and in doing so interrogate the

possibility of a misplacement of science-based values, manifest in the increasing digitization of

education. My stance is that we must repeatedly re-learn the changing reality of the world around

us, and research must reflect and enact an iterative, participatory approach to remain engaged

with this emergent reality. The overall structure of this study, the interview conversations,

analysis, and the discussion that follows are an enactment of these values.

From Theory To Methods

Participants in this study worked within and enacted networks of knowledge, skills, and

resources to meet the goals of their assignments. In approaching this study as an inquiry into

student experiences, I collected self-reported data that describes what they learned about the

subject, the skills they practiced or gained, and the resources they used to do their work. These

participant interviews, along with relevant literature, my own observations in the institutional

context, and my own experiences help me to identify important concepts and develop questions

about how to best enable learning. These multiple sources of data represent records of various

kinds of conversation that merge in this written study, which then serve to catalyze further

participatory meaning-making, as described in more detail later in analysis and discussion.

Rationale for Environmental Education Setting: Guiding Concepts in Interviews

I would like to add some thoughts about my rationale for choosing an environmental education

setting for a field study component and elaborate my evolving understanding of environmental

education. Environmental education, as defined by the British Columbia Ministry of Education

(2007), includes an explicit emphasis on three aspects of education “About,” “In,” and “For” the

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environment. The subject matter is actually not just “About” the environment, and is not only

practicing advocacy and stewardship, but also is learning inherently and explicitly “In” the

environment. This implies a study into one’s own place and relationships as part of a system. As

such it draws attention to several questions: Who and what am I? (identity), Where am I? (place),

and What is happening? (system dynamics). These questions can be thought of as parallel with

the aspects of learning-about, learning-how, and learning-where (Siemens, 2006). In drawing

these connections, there is some blurring. Is know-what about all of identity, place and system

dynamics? Do students develop know-how in the realm of system dynamics? And what does

learning-where mean in environmental education if we don’t limit this notion to descriptions of

places and ecosystems separate from ourselves? If we choose to understand environmental

education as being about ourselves (self) as much as the environment (other), that is to say,

seeing ourselves as part of the (whole) system, then we need to study our relationships within

living and non-living systems, and we need to study the articulations of our individual and

collective being and doing with other elements of the system with which we interact. These

elements shaped the focus of the interviews I conducted for this study: descriptions of

participants’ experiences and activities in a class concerned with environmental issues, assigned

to make videos about their topics of study, in an institution of higher education. This study aims

to characterize interactions from the individual-social scale of student and wider to her or his

interactions with people and resources. The following section describes the field study in more

detail.

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A Field Study Component

Summary and rationale: conversations-in-place

This study includes multiple approaches, including literature research, autobiographical stories,

and theoretical studies. The field study component complements these, and provides fresh

language and perspectives from which to consider the topic further. Although I have had

occasion to observe many students and instructors working with video over the years, only two

students and one instructor contributed to the formal interviews in this field study component.

Were I attempting to collect a representative sample for a more exhaustive study, I would have

pursued further recruitment. However, my aims have been primarily in starting a conversation,

and in opening dialogue through questions grounded in multiple sources of data. Although I

might have recruited more students, the contribution of the instructor was a great help in

enriching the picture, as he was able to provide composite descriptions of things that happened to

larger numbers of students than I could have possibly interviewed. In addition, the instructor’s

comments complemented the concerns of students to draw my attention to a wider view that now

includes not only the instructor’s concerns, but the interactions of students and instructors with

the institution and with groups and agencies beyond the institution. I doubt there would have

been any disadvantage in interviewing more students from the class I worked with, but I also see

that the two students and instructor who participated provided more than enough data to make a

significant contribution to the discussion by helping identify areas for further research.

Field site

I chose a project within a post-secondary course as a field research site because the

characteristics of the project exactly matched my interest in students working with digital video

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technology and environmental education topics. This apparently bounded site—namely, a

course—is in reality more of an entry point to an unpredictable space of learning relationships.

The data generated with students includes their descriptions of the spaces and relationships that

were relevant to their learning. As such, the research site was bounded iteratively through data

collection and analysis. Some specific characteristics of the research site include: an

environmental education topic (ecological footprint); students producing a video on the topic; a

first-year post-secondary program in which students study as a cohort; a mixture of structured

(classroom) and independent (field/location) activities; and a project-based assignment with a

variety of formal and informal settings.

Researcher’s relationship with site and participants

Since 2001, I have been employed at the same university in which this research was conducted,

and over that time have often helped provide resources and support to students. In the summer of

2008 I was invited to provide guest instruction to a class of students who were to be assigned a

project making short public-service announcement videos (PSAs) on the topic of ecological

footprint. The instructor of the course was referred to me for help supporting his students through

the project. The needs expressed at the time included information about access to video

equipment, training on its operation, and introduction to the techniques and craft of video

editing. I mentioned my research interests to the instructor, and he offered to invite his student

group to participate in my research. The guest teaching comprised two lecture-demonstrations. I

identified myself as a guest lecturer, a staff member from a different Faculty, and a graduate

student doing research in the field of technology and learning. I stated to the group that I would

not be collecting data from them during the lecture-demonstrations. I advised the students that

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the lecture-demonstrations were provided in support of their learning and success on the assigned

PSA projects, and that their opportunity to participate in research was separate from the in-class

activities through voluntary participation via sign-up sheets for out-of-class interviews. Their

comments and questions at this stage were to be excluded from the study data, but I recorded my

own experiences and the facts of my own presentations as part of the study context. In the first

meeting I provided the group of twenty-five first-year students an introduction to the language of

video, discussion of the public-service announcement format, some discussion of message

selection and approaches to success in this short form. With the instructor’s approval, I

reinforced the emphasis on communication of ideas above high production values, in effect

advising the students that “As long as the technical quality of video or audio do not distract from

the communication, then high production value of video is not a priority.” For example, a high-

definition format project would not be awarded more marks than an otherwise equal project shot

on a cell phone. This was relevant for several reasons: the university would likely not be

providing enough equipment for the class to do their projects; the output format was ultimately

to YouTube; and the main goals of the project were emphasizing basic video skills,

collaboration, and communication of understanding rather than high technical production value.

A brief demonstration of camera operation and capturing techniques was also presented. The

content of the second workshop moved quickly through a variety of footage acquisition, editing,

and upload methods. One of the guiding principles of these demonstrations was that there was no

prescribed method or technology, but that the basic process could be applied with several kinds

of acquisition and editing tools. The instructor told students they were expected to choose and

find their own resources, although some would be available for pre-approved loan from an

audio-visual department in the university. In accordance with the instructor’s plan, I was not

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available to provide assistance to students during production or post-production. Thus, with the

exception of some troubleshooting conversation over email with the instructor, my involvement

with the students’ projects ended with the guest lectures.

Subjects and recruitment

Several weeks later, on the assignment due date, the class met at its usual time and location for a

screening and class-favourite award contest conducted by the instructor. At this time I was given

an opportunity to describe my study and to distribute paper invitations to participate. I gave all

students a copy of the paper invitation, and I asked that the students indicate their interest or lack

thereof on these sheets, and that they all hand back their invitation sheet whether they wanted to

participate or not. In this way the course instructor would have no way of knowing who chose to

participate. This was intended to protect students’ privacy and anonymity in the context of the

class, and reduce concern that non-/participation in the study could in any way affect a student’s

standing in the course. At the end of the class most of the students returned their sheets, and six

indicated willingness to participate and provided me with availability and contact information.

Student participants were then contacted by email or telephone according to their preference, and

two interviews were scheduled initially, and another later with the instructor. I asked participants

to review their journal entries associated with the video PSA assignments, and to choose whether

they would want to share copies these with me as data. The instructor and the teaching assistant

also offered to participate in interviews.

Methods: data collection focus

Interviews were focused on the physical, disciplinary, academic, institutional, and social context

of several students’ learning experiences. I was also interested to gain more understanding about

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what and how they were learning, through open-ended questions, such as “in what ways was

your experience in this project different or similar to other learning experiences in other

projects?” and “Do you think there was any effect on what you learned because you were making

a video?” We also discussed the context of learning. I asked both students and the instructor to

talk about “the dynamics and the connections and arrangement and configuration of a system that

you're learning in.” Combining their comments about context and about learning, I collected data

that I hoped would help describe what resources students needed to complete their projects, and

where these resources were located in relation to the students. Further, the interviews inquired

into students’ beliefs about what they learned, and how important or valuable this learning was to

them. Also, I asked students to contribute their thoughts about how this learning could be made

better through institutional arrangements, pedagogical design and further research.

To make specific the broader questions above, I asked students about their sources of knowledge

and capabilities, how and where they found what they needed in terms of both knowledge and

resources, what they learned, and how they perceived the value of their learning experience with

the assignment. The questions fall into four general categories: 1) networks of resources; 2)

beliefs about what they learned; 3) beliefs and suggestions about how their learning could be

better supported; and 4) beliefs and suggestions for what should be researched in the future.

Interviewing procedures

In order to refine the interview process before meeting with the students and instructor in the

PSA project group, I conducted pilot interviews with two students who were not connected with

the research participants’ class. These interviews offered me a chance to practice the interview

structure in order to move the process along more naturally and maintain similar duration. I

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arranged to meet with individual participants in either meeting rooms or small classrooms that

allowed relative privacy and safety. I was concerned to provide an interviewing arrangement that

would be quiet enough for audio recording, and yet not so isolated that participants might feel ill-

-at-ease or cornered. I provided on-campus locations where students would be unlikely to be

seen by their course instructor or classmates, once again to protect their anonymity in the context

of the course. After a brief technical setup procedure that included approximately five minutes of

audio testing and speech recognition software profile training, the substantive content of

interviews proceeded as described below.

The first phase of each interview involved questions about students’ technological and

environmental backgrounds. I asked students to rate and describe their perceptions of their own

levels of skill in working with computers, with making digital media, and with internet web sites

and applications, and to describe their perceived prior levels of knowledge and experience

relating to environmental issues. In this section we reviewed what knowledge they brought to the

project, and what knowledge they gained through the project about the ecological footprint

concept, video technology, or digital storytelling. The second phase of the interview included a

questioning and resource-map drawing approach, such that participants each drew a map on a

sheet of paper showing the names and locations of various knowledge, skill, and

technical/physical resources they recruited for their project. These included people who helped,

locations, physical objects, equipment, supplies, and any other resources they remembered. This

mapping excluded resources or individuals who are routinely part of the student’s life but did not

play any role or provide any contribution to the project. Participants were asked to include

themselves in the maps, and they were assured that the data would be stored, interpreted and

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analyzed in such as way as to preserve anonymity and privacy as much as possible. Resource-

mapping offers a descriptive-qualitative spatial view of students’ work, and a way of

representing the students’ learning systems. The third phase of the interview session continued

the semi-structured interview focusing on students’ beliefs about what they learned and its

importance to them. This data provides qualitative indications of whether the kinds of projects

they undertook seemed to them to be worthwhile.

Near the end of the interviews, I also asked students about their opinions of how projects could

be designed and supported to make them better or more valuable to them, allowing open

interpretation by the students of what they might mean by “better” or “valuable.” The structure

of the interview sessions is summarized as follows:

• Protocol administration, signing consent, questions or concerns

• Introduction and overview of interview

• Calibrate voice recording

• Interview part 1: discussion of assignment and participant prior experience

• Interview part 2: resource mapping

• Interview part 3: semi-structured conversation: learning, needs, suggestions

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Data and Analysis

Overview of the Section

Interviews were transcribed into text, and transcripts tagged with descriptors summarizing or

interpreting the main ideas of passages. Following the early stages of a grounded theory method,

as described by Strauss and Corbin (1990), I reviewed the data by sorting tags and looked for

themes that caught my interest, whether because they were especially vivid or concise, seemed to

occur often, or nagged at my intuition. Tagging provided organization, and was conducive to

close reading of transcripts. By spending hours listening to the audio recordings, and then

transcribing these to text, I began to form impressions about several events described therein. For

example, I found that some students were distracted by technical challenges. In another case,

some students improvised and dodged one of the instructor’s intentions for the project. Each of

these was different enough to warrant a new tag. To convey and share my process of learning

from these data elements, I describe the tagging and analysis procedures. Further on, I present

excerpts from the transcripts, and develop interpretations and discussion about their meaning.

Participants

I would like to briefly introduce the participants, Tara and James (pseudonyms) were students in

the course. Tara seemed relaxed and confident in the interview, and her story included some

indications that she had a higher level of technical skill than others in her group. She was the one

to do the troubleshooting, and her group was quite creative with production design, using

puppets that made themselves to convey their message. James was somewhat formal, very well-

spoken, and seemed somewhat reluctant to describe his own skills and abilities. James seemed to

mainly see the exercise of making a video as a different way of showing what he had learned, but

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not so much a learning experience in itself. By the end of the assignment, James reported that he

had not increased his abilities to work with video. Interestingly, James also reported that he

generally found most assignments did not challenge or enrich his learning, in that they provided

“very little learning experience for me in general. I find most assignments of an academic nature

to be geared towards expressing my knowledge versus just gaining knowledge.” His candour

throughout was appreciated, since I could reasonably assume that James was not completely

averse to making critical comments.

Michael (pseudonym) was the instructor of the course, and he was able to make comments about

the class as a whole as well as about his own experience teaching it. He candidly and openly

expressed his belief that he had gone well beyond the requirements of his position in designing

and supporting a video-based assignment, and that project assignment had a mixed outcome.

Michael’s comments also provided a way of checking an additional perspective on both the

concerns raised by students and my own about what and how students were learning and the

impact of video-making technologies and practices with pedagogy. Michael’s interview also

conveyed the sense that a key problem exists in the relative isolation of instructors and to some

extent students. His contribution helped a great deal in my effort to generate questions about the

relationships and configurations of teaching and learning.

Tagging Interview Data

In broad terms, the approach I first took was to read through transcripts and tag segments with

codes. In coding and analyzing the interview transcripts I made a deliberate effort to apply both

interpretive tags as well as descriptive tags. In this way I marked some items with my initial

impressions of their meaning, as well as tagging them with empirical observations that included

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minimal interpretation. For example, a passage from a student that included a statement about

emotions of feelings would be tagged with the descriptor “affect.” I might also interpret the

emotion and label it “affect>frustrated” if I believed that frustration was an accurate

interpretation. The aim of coding was twofold: to be involved with the data in a reflective,

analytical way, and to use the capabilities of the data analysis software to help with efficiency of

recall and to collect related segments for further analysis. I first created several dozen broad

codes, and then nested subcodes within these. For example, when participants used a word that

described a feeling, I applied the code “affect,” then added subcodes to provide more detail, such

as “affect>challenging,” “affect>confusion,” “affect>interesting,” and “affect>uncertainty,” to

name a few.

As I was unfamiliar with the software and new to the process of software-assisted qualitative

data analysis, I refined my coding design as I went. After cycling through transcripts I had 198

codes. Tags were applied 958 times to text segments in the transcripts of two students and one

instructor. Many passages were marked with multiple tags. In the case of “locations,” for

example, I opted for redundancy and overlap rather than force a system of exclusive codes, so a

piece of transcript that mentioned “residence commons block” was tagged with both “location”

and “resources” tags. In practice, some such items in the transcripts were tagged with multiple

subcodes as well. I decided that since my purpose in coding was involvement with the data and

recall of segments rather than developing theory, exclusive codes and categories were not

necessary at this stage.

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Reading the Data: Emerging Issues and Themes

I approached the analysis with an expectation that interesting issues would arise from reading

transcripts and reflecting on these in light of experience. Through an inductive approach I

identified some issues of interest. I collected data segments that were related by similar tags and

I analyzed these for thematic links, or synthesizing concepts. I also looked for repetition of

related tags within and across transcripts. The approach was not exhaustive, in the sense that I

did not mine the data for all possible concepts.

Technical problems: an isolated incident?

As mentioned earlier, I found some evidence of problems using technology, described in

comments from both the instructor and the student participants. I found that a software version

change was a small problem for one group: Tara noted she had to spend time teaching herself

how to use the latest version of the iMovie (08) editing program. She had previously used the

“06 HD” version, and found the new version to be very different. She describes her experience of

encountering and overcoming a problem in this excerpt from the transcript (edited for clarity):

Morgan: Did you have any problems with editing?

Tara: A little bit because that was the first time I used this version of iMovie. I'm used to

the old one, so I basically fiddled around with it at home in between filming

and editing. Just to try to figure out how to use it.

Morgan: So the learning how to use iMovie, it was already on your computer, and you

were familiar with the previous version. Where did you learn your skills with

the previous version?

Tara: I basically just messed around with it a lot and figure things out by luck, I guess. I

did use the help feature occasionally, but for the most part it was just sort of

guessing, seeing how things worked.

Morgan: Okay. Had you taken, had you made any videos before?

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Tara: Yes sort of. Nothing that had to be good or anything, just stuff for fun. Like, I think

I filmed my friend’s hamster once, nothing serious at all.

Morgan: You were working with iMovie, the new version. I've seen it.

Tara: Yeah it's a bit frustrating.

Morgan: It is different from the old one I do understand that. Were you completely on

your own to solve the problem, learn it, figure it out? Or did you find help from

somewhere? Or something?

Tara: I just messed around with it for awhile, and just figured it out. It took me a good

half hour to figure out how to put clips together and everything, but after I

pressed a few buttons, I don't remember exactly what I did, but I did figure it

out eventually. Yeah that was good. Although I do know that someone else in

the class who had severe difficulty with the old version of iMovie, so they

could not get any sound on theirs, so theirs was silent in the end. So I guess I

was lucky. Figuring things out.

As empricial information, this data first struck me as, at most, an anecdotal confirmation of my

expectations, of limited value. So, yes, the student encountered technical problems with iMovie,

and was able to solve them herself. After spending time reflecting on this anecdote in a number

of ways, it became increasingly suggestive and fertile. Tara had encountered technical problems

with iMovie, and was able to solve them herself. The resources mapping portion of the interview

supplemented this information with some context: Tara owned her own computer; had previous

experience with the computer itself, and had the skill, freedom and flexibility to use it to learn

new applications and to solve problems on her own time. Her related experiences, namely

previous skill with an earlier version of the application, and with the computer platform, were

indicated elsewhere in the interview data as well. She had stated that she was comfortable with

self-teaching applications. Tara was also able to reflect on her situation in relation to others. She

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knew other students had application problems, and said she was “lucky” that she could solve hers

on her own.

“Technical problems”: a common issue?

Now that I had collected and reviewed empirical data specific to one situation, I looked for

evidence that might help develop the theme of “technical problems” in the students’ projects.

The instructor corroborated and described the problem of iMovie skill levels:

Michael: An example problem was a number of them were familiar with older versions of

iMovie, and then they attempted to use the most recent version of iMovie to

put together the video, because obviously the most recent version of any

software is the best piece of software (laughter). So, that was very unfortunate.

I don't even know what the most recent version of iMovie looks like, but as I

understand it is nowhere near as friendly, and it is nowhere near as smile-

inducing as older versions. Some of them went a very great distance right? And

they simply realized that they were going to have to start again. And I felt very

badly for those couple of groups, because there was nothing I could do other

than to provide them with encouraging words.

“Technical problems”: impact on learning?

The instructor indicated that this was not simply a minor obstacle, but in some cases seemed to

have an impact on student learning. I asked him whether he thought the technology and the

nature of the assignment helped or hindered their learning.

Michael: Okay, did the technology help or hinder their learning? I would say that

depended entirely on the student. If they got very interested, if their

imagination was captured by, you know, the opportunity to put together a

digital video, then I think it propelled them to delve into the issue a little bit

deeper. Unfortunately for the students who were not thrilled by that, I'm

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hesitant to say that it actually hindered them, right? But it certainly put the

brakes on, on the additional research that they had to do to inform the video.

Right? So, if there's a group who were not so comfortable with the technology,

right? That was a bit of a speed bump, and they didn't go off and necessarily

sort of learn that topic in great detail. Which was unfortunate.

Morgan: Just asking again, what put the brakes on?

Michael: Right, the students’ discomfort or their inability to express themselves in the

medium of digital video. It did put the brakes on them sort of finding that, sort

of creative way through the assignment. So apart from, you know, this one

group that I've described to did find a creative way through the assignment,

they didn't actually explore the topic in any more detail than if it were any just

written assignment or anything like that. For some of the groups where the

people were not so technically competent, their videos ended up being, they

were all impressive, especially where they were coming from, but just for a

range in the class some of them were not as impressive as others because they

became more fixated on video as the medium rather than telling an amazing

fantastic story in whatever cobbled and sort of lackluster technical fashion they

could.

At first I had an individual student’s description of the iMovie version problem, but looking

further it became apparent that this issue affected many members of the class. We return to this

later on where there is an indication from the instructor that the technology “put the brakes on”—

in other words inhibited engagement and learning.

“Technical problems”: preventable?

At this point I began to interpret the iMovie version problem as an example of an issue that

perhaps could have been somehow predicted or solved. However, the specific problem may not

be exactly relevant to another context, or even a new group next year in the same context. Might

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there be mechanisms, methods, practices, or models might help to anticipate and deal with this

kind of problem in the future? The next step in my analysis of this anecdote is to suggest that

there is a need for students to be aware of what equipment and software they are going to be

using to do their work, and that they must be ready to use them when the time comes to produce

and edit their stories. This is the point in analysis where my thinking crossed into consideration

of a learner in a community context. The example of Tara’s problem and the similar problems of

others in the class drew my attention to the speculation that if everyone could have known about,

anticipated, and solved the versioning problem well ahead of the due date, they might have been

able to maintain more focus on the subject matter. Perhaps the iMovie version issue could have

been averted in this case, if 1) there had been a practice phase that was debriefed with the group,

2) the students tested and evaluated their workflows beforehand, 3) the test/evaluation process

was easily accessible, quick, and supported by people with skill in the fields in which the

students were working, and 4) solutions and alternatives were shared and iterated through this

same cycle. I looked further into the data to see how students dealt with their weaknesses in

information or skill with technology.

“Complex problems, complex ‘solutions’”: when in doubt, students improvise

A variety of data segments from the transcripts point to active negotiation of technology issues,

and illustrate student capabilities and efforts to focus on the messages and meanings of the

environmental issue of ecological footprint, even though they were less comfortable with the

technology. There is an example of a group that effectively minimized some of the technical

challenges of producing video by taking an approach the instructor did not expect, and produced

a video that in my reading was quite good at conveying a message rooted in the subject matter.

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Their strategy included creative interpretation of the assignment intentions. The value of this

anecdote is that it illustrates both a disconnection between instructor intentions and an active

negotiation of the meaning in the work of video-making for an environmental education topic.

The instructor talked of one group of students who completed the assignment, but compensated

for a shortage of video production skills in their group. They availed themselves of Creative

Commons and public domain video clips, and according to the instructor, “what it meant was

that they put their video together in one-tenth the time that it took everybody else” (Michael). I

began to wonder if and why this was an issue, and returned to the instructor’s comments.

Michael: This one group found an escape hatch, which I did not know was there, to avoid

all of this and that is they did not actually capture their own video…. In fact, in

the future if I were to run this again I would actually specifically state in the

assignment that I want them to capture their own video. And that if they

wanted to use other people's open source video clips that was fine, but I would

put a limit on that.

I pursued further analysis of this anecdote. The instructor mentioned that he would change the

assignment instructions next time. I set to searching the interview transcripts for comments about

the students’ and instructor’s perceptions of assignment requirements. The instructor

communicated his intentions of assignment requirements to the students prior to the work being

done in several ways. The assignment handout noted that, by the end of the assignment, they

would “be able to use a video camera and digital video editing software” (see Appendix A). The

substance of the assignment, which was to create a one-minute public service announcement

(PSA) on the subject of ecological footprint, was described in the same handout and corroborated

by students’ interview comments, but students did not mention any perception of requirement to

shoot all their own footage. The fact that one group chose to produce a video mostly made of

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downloaded clips seemed to be a potentially interesting lens. I looked further into the definition

of the assignment as a collection of characteristics. The assignment (See Appendix A) was

inherently complex, and the handout, according to the instructor, itself reflected this:

Michael: I mean, it's a very long very detailed assignment. Lots of text. It’s two pages of

single-spaced text because there are so many steps and it's so complicated, and

I was delegating it all, effectively to them. And there are so many places for

things to go awry. I tried to be as clear as I could at every single stage of where

they had to be in the assignment. It was a tremendous challenge for me to be

able to communicate that in the assignment. In retrospect, if I were to do that

again, perhaps what I should do is instead of giving them the entire assignment

in one fell swoop like that, I should perhaps feed it to them in one nugget at a

time.

There was not an explicit requirement for a ratio of original footage, and Creative Commons

sources were both demonstrated in a training session and recommended in the assignment. There

was a storyboard stage, and a requirement for a production plan and timeline, which explicitly

mentioned a shooting window. A paradox of sorts begins to emerge, wherein the instructor

appears to have spent a great deal of time designing the assignment, yet cannot contain the

complexities and ambiguities. This is not necessarily a matter of the project being an experiment

for the instructor, as he had assigned it previously and has revised it since. In the research

interviews, the students had comments on the nature of the assignment, revealing a divergence in

their perceptions from the expectations of the instructor.

Tara: It had to be a video. And I'm guessing that if we wanted to we could have made a

video using, like, screenshots or something, and just had a voice. You did not

have to necessarily, I think, film anything yourself. Like, you could take

pictures and use pictures from the web I imagine.

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It was not Tara’s group that had used downloaded footage. Rather, far from avoiding shooting

their own footage, Tara’s group chose to produce a video with somewhat challenging production

design. They used animated sets, sock puppets, props, voice-over, and timed music. This

introduced in my thinking a question of the students’ skill levels and access to resources, which

warrants further treatment shortly. There is some disconnection between, on the one hand, an

effort to control and guide students through instructions and arrangements, and, on the other

hand the emergence of improvisation among the students. Students were not just free to

improvise—they needed to do so. Instructor comments indicated that the assignment was

logistically difficult to support, so that while he would arrange access to as many resources as

possible, the students would be on their own to deal with the technical aspects of the production.

Among the resources arranged by the instructor were: two in-class guest lecture-demonstrations

(provided by the author); loaner cameras from the faculty technology centre; computer lab time

blocks for editing; email and telephone help for technical problems.

The instructor was concerned and went to substantial effort to provide for students’ technology

needs.

Michael: I spent so much time trying to make sure, to communicate things with [the

faculty technology centre]… and say okay this is my class. I gave them the list

of names and student numbers so they could sign out cameras. I reserved

computer lab time for them, so that no matter what happens, they could do the

entire assignment without having to spend one penny of their own money.

The instructor also intended for the students to collect and use resources on their own, and learn

whatever skills they needed to complete the assignment. Apart from the guest lecture-

demonstrations, students were not provided with any formal training or support.

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Michael: the way the assignment was designed, I simply delegated. I outlined what I

wanted them to do, I delegated to them, and I said “I'm available to deal with

your technical disasters” but apart from that, I simply left it up to them… So,

apart from occasional interventions… if I can be crass, it was their problem to

overcome all of the technical hurdles.

Further, the instructor indicated this expectation that students would improvise: “they could use

whatever tools and whatever resources they wanted, and I just wanted a finished video at the

end.” (Michael) The results of this implicit requirement to improvise were unexpected in two

ways. First, the students did not use the loaner resources arranged by the instructor.

Michael: I also know for a fact that … none of them used [university] hardware to really

do anything. I think a few of them signed out cameras. All of the editing took

place on their own computers in dorm rooms and wherever else they were… I

reserved equipment for them on campus, and as a matter of fact, me going

around and getting my hands on access to equipment was a complete and total

waste of my time.

Another unexpected improvisation: the instructor was impressed by the extent to which students

recruited assistance and resources from unexpected sources. He indicated that he was not aware

of the actual sources of footage and music for the videos until the finished videos were

submitted.

Michael: In fact some of these were almost quasi-family productions occasionally. I

know one girl asked her brother to provide a soundtrack. He's in a band

somewhere. So he sat down and he recorded a piece of original music for them

to use for their public service announcement. I know another girl asked

someone, a roommate of hers on this same floor to play a piece of original

music… So they all started trying to create their own music, and that's how

they got around that, was by enlisting quote unquote experts to do something

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for them, … So, they drew in friends and family. I mean, there were people—I

had no idea who they were—appearing in the videos…there were people who

were active in making these videos who were not getting course credit.

The students clearly had unsupervised latitude in the production and editing phases. To some

extent this might seem to indicate that students were unconstrained in their abilities to design and

produce their videos. A closer examination of the data indicates other aspects that may be

relevant to students design decisions with respect to how they chose to meet the requirements of

the assignment.

“Many tasks, many skills”: prior learning, individual and collective action

I was curious about student abilities, particularly skills with media production and editing. In

addition, group composition presents as a potential factor, and finally access to resources of

several kinds presents an avenue for further discussion. Both the students themselves and the

instructor described a wide range of comfort levels and skills with video technology. James

indicated a limited level of skill and comfort with the video medium:

James: [I have] generic skills I guess, you could say…research…I had nothing

technical…I know how to take pictures with a camera. I know how to take

videos with a camera so the simple stuff you should expect somebody with a

digital camera to be able to know how to use. That I was able to do. However

specific technical requirements of skill specific to the film medium like making

an actual video or film I don’t have…I found the film medium to be awkward

because it suggested a certain technical background in terms of film and I

guess that is a background I did not feel I have sufficient knowledge or mastery

of to come up with an effective assignment at the time to suit perhaps the

project requirements.

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The instructor described three categories of students, and estimated how many students fit into

each category:

Michael: So then starting with the least comfortable of, not comfortable with technology.

There were twenty-two in the class. There were maybe six of them were not

comfortable with technology. For the people who were more comfortable with

technology, I would say perhaps there were eight or so. So even though they

themselves weren't all experts through their previous experiences, dealing with

the technology was not such a challenge for them. And then for the people who

had experience with digital video, these are kind of overlapping boundaries, so

I'd say like maybe four, six, right? Approximately. Approximately. Part of the

problem with me imposing numbers on this is I only have access to what they

would say in class and the kinds of questions they would ask. … Students

coming out of high school, I would say maybe 45% of them had experience

with some kind of digital video in high school.

Having an approximate sense of the skills distribution of the class group, I asked the instructor

about groups or individuals who had problems. He reported

Michael: there were people who I would call them borderline averse to using the

technology, and in fact it's unfortunate that there were a number of people who

were averse together in the same group.

The instructor identified this as the group mentioned earlier who chose to produce their video

using mostly downloaded footage. Although the downloading of footage did not fit the

instructor’s expectations, the finished video is in my opinion originally scripted, communicates a

clear message about the subject and is well-edited. The instructor’s mention of group

composition, noting that this group was averse to technology, led me to inquire further into the

ways groups handled the tasks of researching and producing their videos. James indicated that

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his group allocated work based on existing skills, and did not develop significant additional skills

through the assignment.

James: That group member had prior experience working with video media and so they

did much of the editing at the time of the work whereas the other two of us did

some of the shooting as well as research so we split it up that way based on our

respective strengths… I didn’t end up doing any of the editing. I don’t know

how to do any of the editing.

Conversely, Tara reported everybody in her group participated in the editing work, although it is

difficult to determine to what extent all students actually worked with the editing in a hands-on

sense. When asked if everybody participated in the editing, she replied “Yes. Yes pretty much.

We'd pretty much sat in there for a half an hour, and just cut things out and changed the tones in

the pictures. Stuff like that so it looked better.” (Tara) With respect to the story development

process, it is clear that there was shared participation:

Tara: Yes we just talked things through, and sort of, no one originally came with this

idea, it just sort of evolved in our conversation. So, I'm really glad that we had

it as a group thing otherwise I would not have come up with much.

“Connections made and missed”: a lack of formal interactions

The variety of skill levels among a few students is still only a small part of the picture. It seemed

that students were using more and different resources than those the instructor arranged. Given

that they did not use the resources set aside for them at the university, I wondered whether those

resources were actually unnecessary, or just not appropriate in some way, such as them being

perhaps more trouble than they would be worth to students compared to resources they brought

themselves. At least one third of each interview involved a resource-mapping exercise, in which

students were asked to draw and describe a schematic map of the resources they used for the

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project. The map was not meant to be geographically or spatially accurate but rather served as a

recall device, to evoke memory of where they obtained cameras, computers, information, skills,

assistance, inspiration, props, etc, and where they did the project work. The resource mapping

exercise yielded data indicating that students for the most part used resources they already had or

had access to, and used university infrastructure, such as internet access and locations, but very

little to no university equipment. As I learned about the struggles of the students and the

instructor, and students’ improvised arrangements for resources and assistance, I reflected on

their experiences in terms of the communities of practice (CoPs) concepts developed by Wenger

(1998). I began to wonder if any of the learners and instructors were involved at all in any forms

of legitimate peripheral participation, with any forms of communities of practice relevant to the

project assignment. When I analyzed the interview data, it was striking to me that the instructor

appeared to be working in relative isolation, and that the students’ work had not been guided into

connection with any communities of practice. That there appeared to be very little structured

involvement with CoPs did not seem abnormal to me at first, but this gradually emerged as an

interesting issue. The next section continues the discussion of data, but in a somewhat different

format, wherein my interpretation shifts from a descriptive approach to developing themes in

more depth through questioning. These questions are the substantive results of this study.

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From Inquiry to Conversation: Translating Data into Questions

I have been exploring ideas around environmental education, ideas around digital media

technology, and reflecting on the accounts of a small number of people involved in learning

activities that bring these together. As a result of this exploration, it seems to me that students,

instructors, and the institutional systems in which we work spend a great deal of time and effort

concerned with practical technology issues, such as how to use cameras, computers, and

software. This focus on basic technology operations might detract from the work of learning

about and engaging with the environmental issues, and perhaps sap motivation. I am genuinely

concerned by the potential situation of the no-longer-hypothetical student who chooses to enroll

in an environment-related course only to spend an inordinate amount of time struggling with

converting video files or troubleshooting a soundtrack. On an emotional and instinctive level,

this strikes me as a sad waste of initiative. I would rather see these students having guided field

experiences than sitting in front of computers and cobbling together some simple repetition of a

popular analysis. I would rather see the power and reach of video used incisively and tactically to

convey original and compelling messages and stories. I would like to see students reveal the

dynamics of particular examples of unsustainable practices and follow these with persuasive

local examples of participation and transformation toward the future that they are in the process

of creating. I would like to see them using video to engage with and catalyze positive change,

and I would like to see them exercising their judgment as to when to set the technology aside,

and experience the multi-sensory, physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, and social

aspects of their lived environments, and be motivated by these to overcome obstacles, so they

might eventually help to translate abstract environmental problems into solutions that become

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familiar and normal parts of culture, like recycling has in some parts of the world. These are real

goals that I think can be served by well-designed learning experiences in postsecondary

institutions. That being understood, I need to reflect on the distance between these desires of

mine and the state of the research that I have so far undertaken. I found little research that

directly addressed the issues and practices of students bringing environmental studies and digital

media production together, and so approached this work as naively as I could, as a new field. I

began with qualitative research and chose to provide a multi-faceted depiction of my thinking,

qualifying my account as subjective and inductive. My belief that research, however

systematically written up, often progresses through subjective, inductive, intuitive phases has

been reinforced by my own experience. I trust the potential value of both the intuitive and the

deductive as complementary. This thesis is of course an account of the more subjective and

intuitive phase of a potentially rich series of studies. The outcome of this intuitive, subjective

exploration and reflection, and its articulation with future study, is a body of questions. I am

offering that the research phase which I have just gone through involves questions of the form

“What is going on in these examples?” which can include concrete details such as “Where?”

“How?” and “With whom?” There are no claims to broadly translatable representativeness or

transferrable significance. This phase leads to answers about specific cases and personal

perspectives. I learned some empirical details about what two students and an instructor did.

There are some rather banal statements that can be drawn out of this level: students and

instructors have different experiences, and some experience these as more or less positive or

valuable. However, there is nothing said about the meaning of “positive,” or “valuable”, let alone

what could be done to make things “better.“ My point here is that this exploratory phase is about

describing, more than about evaluating, and about identifying interesting elements for further

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study. For example, it may be possible in future to study the relationships of these elements with

learning outcomes. While I do not aim to develop universal principles for designing similar

projects, I would expect that this and further research along these lines could contribute to

decision-making. This contribution would not be prescriptive, but certainly could highlight

potential pitfalls and factors for consideration. So, in the exploratory phase any statements I

make are only descriptive. To provide a basis from which to proceed beyond this phase, I offer a

range of questions that would not have occurred to me had I not conducted this research.

From Issues to Questions

The following discussion develops the bridge between “What was going on in these examples?”

(initial exploratory research question) and a series of concepts and questions that I suggest for

taking forward into longer-term research. Most of the discussion in this section is developed

from data recorded in interview with the instructor, “Michael.” I find that the instructor’s

comments are helpful in addressing issues quite directly. There is a distillation in the instructor’s

comments. He reflects on the design of the project assignment and offers a view that includes

candid perspectives on the students’ activities in an institutional context. Institutional context led

me to questions regarding the students’ interactions with their context. These questions tend to

begin with considerations of pedagogy and branch from there to touch on theory, values, and

some practical aspects. I am struck by the emergence of this practical theme, as I encountered the

idea that time and effort were limited, and a good deal of both could be expended by students

and instructors on practical concerns. I have identified a number of questions that pertain to

learning, to pedagogy, and to the structures and systems in which these occur. I offer a series of

questions that develop lines of inquiry into whether and how the concepts of communities of

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practice might be applied to understanding and enhancing the design of learning situations. There

are also areas that I think could warrant further study that may require better understanding of the

roles and capabilities of the members of the class, the teaching teams, institutional professionals,

community members, and other organizations. Some analysis is suggested of elements in a

learning system. Finally some concepts are offered for more speculative, reflective, and

imaginative work, primarily relating to the way relationships are developed and enacted through

environmental education activities.

Intention: fit between instructor’s and students’ perceptions?

The instructor’s perspective, as presented in assignment materials and interview conversations,

indicated that he intended for students to engage the topic of ecological footprint and produce a

short public service announcement (PSA)–style video. Some of the pedagogical considerations

were: learning objectives; procedures and steps involved in the assignment; type of instruction;

delivery format; assessment; and structure of student activities. Interesting questions arise around

fit of the assignment with the outcomes in terms of student work. The instructor describes his

intentions

Michael: what they were supposed to do in the assignment was I wanted them to take a

body of theory we talked about in class, and I wanted them to explore that

theory in some kind of a real or practical application.

The specific goal is described in a three-page assignment handout provided to students:

Your ultimate goal is to produce an original 60-second public service announcement on the subject. The context can be here on campus or in society more generally. How can these concepts be used for good? Create a video to communicate the essence of the model and its potential application. (Appendix A)

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Individual students were required to keep an ongoing diary, and directed to conduct research on

the ecological footprint model, then work together in groups to specify their message and

objectives for communication of this message. The assignment handout included a section with

instructions and suggestions for research,

Research the Ecological Footprint model (you were introduced to the model in lecture on Sept 10th). What more can you learn about how the model is being used to affect positive change? Can you identify any strategies that do not appear to already be in use? (Appendix A)

The handout provided students with instructions for specific stages and requirements such as a

proposal, a project timeline, a storyboard, and a finished video. In retrospect, the assignment

struck me as both thorough and potentially overwhelming. Focusing on this stage of the process,

I would like to discuss some aspects of the fit between students’ understanding of the assignment

in comparison to the instructor’s intentions. The instructor also expressed an interest in better

understanding of the role and effect of the assignment handout:

Michael: I am continually tinkering with the assignment, the written assignment sheet

that I hand out, and that I go through in detail in class. I am always very

interested in that connection, or that role that assignment sheet plays, because

in my experience it's been crucial, right? Even though I had something in my

mind as to what I wanted to accomplish, sometimes it's very frustrating that

even the most ridiculous phrasing will send them down one path or another, in

ways that I did not anticipate at all. I don't know if that's something that can be

researched, or whether that's just experience, of testing of different

assignments, on different groups of students.

Michael notes the complexity of the ecological footprint topic, and this combined with the

technological challenges faced by some students is a self-reported indication of a less-than-ideal

outcome for at least some of his students:

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Michael: The notion of ecological footprint, not as successful. I mean the videos were

very good and they had fun and they learned a lot. However, the more

theoretical the theme for the year, the more, it was much easier for them to drift

off much further away from what I was hoping that they would accomplish.

Two questions arise here: “How does the instructor determine the students’ comprehension of

the assignment?” and “What is the instructor’s level of experience, both in doing the kind of

work required in the assignment, and in teaching this kind of project?” Unpacking the first of

these could reveal an opportunity to study the mechanisms, and validity of various means of

checking students’ comprehension of assignments. The second question regarding instructor

experience has considerable potential for identifying an indicator and sparking professional

debate. Does an instructor’s experience level in practice and teaching correlate with degree of fit

between assignment intention and student understanding? If so, would it be possible to indicate

paths for professional development levels that could reasonably be considered necessary for

teaching this kind of assignment? It is of course up to professionals themselves to determine the

need for further experience and training, but these decisions can be better made when supported

by research into outcomes for instructors of different levels of experience. A quantitative

approach to these questions could require validated measurements of fit between instructor

intentions and student comprehension of assignments, and a sufficiently large sample of

instructors of varying experience teaching similar projects. I would offer that while these last are

interesting questions, one of the methodological challenges would be to sufficiently support any

claims to comparability among instructional settings and projects.

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Students’ skills: prior assessment and group distribution?

Further discussion revealed that it was possible that the video-making requirement, specifically

the affinity or lack thereof for technology was, for some students, inhibiting to their success in

the project:

Michael: Okay, did the technology help or hinder their learning? I would say that

depended entirely on the student. If they got very interested, if their

imagination was captured by, you know, the opportunity to put together a

digital video, then it, I think it propelled them to delve into the issue a little bit

deeper. Unfortunately for the students who were not thrilled by that, I'm

hesitant to say that it actually hindered them, right? But it certainly put the

brakes on, on the additional research that they had to do to inform the video.

Right? So, if there's a group who were not so comfortable with the technology,

right? That was a bit of a speed bump, and they didn't go off and necessarily

sort of learn that the scene, that topic in great detail, which was

unfortunate…In my experience, more often than not, realistically, one person

edited the video. That was usually the most technically competent, savvy

person. Occasionally, when a group did not have such a person in their midst,

that caused problems, and very much hindered what the group was able to

produce.

This brings up the subject of how one deals with the various levels of technical skills in the

group. The instructor built in some stages for students to assess their own and one another’s

areas of strength with the technology, including a stage in which students were required to plan

the division of labour on the project. As a prior group knowledge and skills assessment, this may

have had some effect in helping students to calibrate what they would be able to do. The

assignment included a reminder to “be realistic about what you can hope to accomplish with the

visuals” (Appendix A). However, the arrangement of groups by the instructor did not necessarily

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take into account the technical skills of the individuals in the groups, so the existing capabilities

of the groups of students were variable by accident, and therefore some groups were weak.

Michael: It's unfortunate that there were a number of people who were adverse to the

technology in the same group. Which was a total surprise to me. When I'm

putting them together in the groups, especially as the beginning of the year, I

don't know the students. I don't know the capabilities. It's just more random of

the draw. I did try to put them together according to their personalities and how

they… might work. But as far as their technical competence, it's a mystery to

me.

Bringing together the notions of group composition and technical skills distribution, I would

suggest that it would be helpful to ground these aspects of instructional design in research that

addresses the following question: “What are valid and effective methods for prior knowledge

assessment for both skills and conceptual understanding required to undertake the assignment?”

To be specific to the context of environmentally themed video production assignments, it would

be necessary to ask “What are the relevant skills?” and “How do we measure these?” It may be

worthwhile to develop the practice of prior knowledge assessment in areas relating to the

technologies being used, to the subject matter, and further to the application of these two in

concert. We might ask “What prior experience do the students have producing video?” and

“What are the students’ knowledge (information), analytical (thinking), and applied (experience)

levels of previous or present engagement with the subject matter, both in formal and informal

learning settings?” To turn these questions into workable assessments would require adaptation

and specification to the particular technologies and topics to be undertaken, and to changes in

these over time.

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Time: awareness of changing skills among students?

Michael reports a significant difference in the skills and backgrounds of two groups of students

less than two years apart. Recalling the distribution of skills from an earlier time he taught the

assignment, the instructor offers

Michael: The first year there were one or two students who were very accomplished. I

mean, they had a lot of experience in all things film and video. … of the

twenty, there was one student who actually considered himself to be much

more than amateur, right? Like, he already considered himself to be quasi

professional. …Of the rest of them, I would consider there is another tier of

them who I would consider to be highly technically literate, highly technically

savvy. And so, even though they had no experience with this sort of thing

before, [any] technological situation…that anyone were to throw at them, they

would navigate their way through it just fine. And, I would say it of the twenty

there's maybe three, or so like that. And then the overwhelming majority of

them, they would use a computer for a word processor or e-mail, but if

something actually went wrong with their computer they would probably have

to enlist the help of others to solve whatever the problem is. So that was the

first year.

Eighteen months later, the students tended to have more experience with digital video coming

into the course: “The second time, I ran this, students coming out of high school, I would say

maybe 45% of them had experience with some kind of digital video in high school.” (Michael)

Prior knowledge and skills assessment is a potentially sound basis for decisions on group

composition. But to fully inform group composition decisions, one would need a sense of what

roles are required, and further of what capabilities for fulfilling these roles an instructor can

expect from student. Both the prior knowledge / skills assessments and the group composition

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heuristics have to account for changes in the skills required and for demographic and technology

changes. This prior knowledge and skills assessment is at face value a practical recommendation

for designing instruction. For it to be of such value, it needs to be grounded in research that

evaluates the variety, effectiveness, and value of such prior knowledge assessment in appropriate

settings. Assuming that I should conduct prior knowledge and skills assessment, I want to base

my choices on research that deals with sound, adaptable methods of prior knowledge and skills

assessment as well as the application of the results of these assessments to pedagogical decisions,

including group composition.

Synthesizing problem-solving questions into research questions

To assess students’ prior knowledge and skills and experiences is not simply a one-way

extraction of data, but enacts a dialog on expectations, which starts not with the students, but

with the instructor and curriculum developers. An instructor’s considered approach to assessing

prior knowledge requires the instructor to specify for him- or herself the knowledge and skills

required for the assignment. Having a clear sense of this is a start, and then the students’

perpetual question of “What are we supposed to do?” can be preceded with some reflection of

their own on whether they are prepared for the task at hand. A prior knowledge assessment

process is therefore a communication and learning tool in itself, helping students to focus their

energies and know where they might need to learn more and develop more skills. So prior

assessment instruments need to meet a few criteria. Such questions should:

• account for changing skills and knowledge requirements over time

• be clear enough to facilitate dialogue and focus improvement where required

• be sensitive to improvement in an individual’s skills

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• account for roles in working groups as well as skills and knowledge in individuals

• ideally, support comparison.

The last is of some interest with respect to conducting research on the prior knowledge

assessment: The research questions associated with prior knowledge / skills assessment and with

group composition should ask “To what extent and in what ways are prior knowledge and skills

assessments used in designing group composition by experienced versus inexperienced

instructors?” and “What differences in outcomes are found when such assessments are carried

out compared to when groups are designed randomly or by other criteria?” In short, I would

expect that there might be some different outcomes among groups who are organized under the

judgment of experienced instructors, and that the explicitness and formality of such assessments

is variable among different instructors. Developing this query a little further, I would be

interested to see what, if any, correlation patterns exist between instructor experience and

explicitness of prior knowledge / skills assessment. We might learn something about the pathway

to expert instruction. For example, I would expect correlations showing less-experienced

instructors using brief, superficial assessment, moderately experienced instructors using more

detailed and explicit assessment, and expert instructors using very concise and reliable methods

of prior knowledge and skills assessments. Is it possible that instructors develop and test their

own heuristics with more experience? This example suggests some considerable potential for

iterative and specific study into professional development and the interactions with pedagogy

and learning in the rapidly changing fields of digital media production and environmental

education.

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Practical and technical concerns: containing complexity?

Michael offers an indicator of how crucial early stages of the project could be. Once the students

were in their groups, they were largely on their own.

Michael: I did not have access to them going through the struggle of actually assembling

things, so I don't really know. Right? So, in that sense the way the assignment

was designed, I simply delegated. I outlined what I want them to do, I

delegated to them, and I said I'm available to deal with your technical disasters,

but apart from that, I simply left it up to them.

Thinking about the group’s activities as a system, the early stages of the project as they are

guided and shaped by the instructor’s decisions are an inflection point in the system’s growth

and development. Group composition, the instructor’s and students’ awareness of their

knowledge and skills, and the instructions for the assignment form a set of initial conditions from

which emerge the diverse activities and decisions the students undertake to complete the

assignment. It is reasonable to expect a range of outcomes, but my concern for this stage and the

is based on the idea that the initial conditions, namely the moments and methods by which

pedagogical decisions are enacted by the instructor, warrant a great deal of research attention.

Once these initial conditions are incorporated into the students’ activities, they may diverge or

converge in very interesting ways.

The degree to which students’ activities are focused on execution of the assignment is of course

affected by pedagogical decisions, but logistics and practical arrangements may have inordinate

impact on project outcomes. The instructor indicates he would like to see research into ways of

simplifying the technological and practical aspects of the assignment.

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Michael: As far as more research might go, there's two things going on at least, in this

assignment and there is [1] what I want them to learn for their topic, and then

[2] having to translate that into video speak… If there were some way of

containing the technical or video aspect of it, because I pretty much gave them

an entirely open field, maybe if I start putting a lot more very strict boundaries

on the tools that they should use, and simplify that enormously, maybe that

would help. I'd be interested in knowing what other people might think of that.

Because, as I say they're highly video literate, the problem, unfortunately that's

on the receiving end of video. In terms of creating video, that's a lot more

spotty, in my experience.

Some of the outcomes of this class assignment may have resulted from students’ unexpected

adaptations to the requirements of the “entirely open field” (Michael) of the assignment. I

wonder, then “Is it possible that simplifying the technical aspects would lead to different or

improved outcomes in the students’ work?” To deal with this question in more specific detail, I

would also ask “What does it mean to simplify the technical aspects?” and “Is it helpful to

students to use a standard set of technologies?” This second question may be measured in terms

of outcomes, but could also be studied as a qualitative inquiry into student experience. As such, a

chief goal would be providing students with opportunities to learn effectively and focus on

subject material objectives. A secondary goal, no less valuable, could be to inform the institution

and instructors as to what technology issues students are concerned with and also to maintain

dialog on new and emerging technologies, possibly addressing misconceptions held by staff and

instructors about students’ interests in technology. Questions of whether it is helpful to students

to use standard sets of technologies need to account for change as well, as what may be an

advantage at one time could become a liability with changing technology. “If using standard

technologies is helpful, in what specific ways is this helpful?” and “What trade-offs or

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disadvantages are there to using standard sets of technologies?” Disadvantages need to be

accounted for. “Is it desirable to provide or require a standard set of technologies?” and “What, if

any, differences exist in outcomes where technology options are unspecified and unrestricted

versus specified and restricted?” I would be interested to find ways of determining the extent to

which creative and outstanding communication is evident in groups using diverse versus those

using standard technologies. “Are there significant differences in originality and creative

expression among students using standard technologies as opposed to those using a diverse set?”

Cultures and technologies: choices in participation?

Choice of technology could be understood as culturally based. Instructors’ and students’

awareness of and preference for technologies used in their work may be connected to the

practices of their social circles, fellow students, and those of the institutions and communities in

which they work, study, and play. There is a great deal to be learned about the interactions and

roles of cultures in students’ experiences with technology. The questions I offer here are aimed at

moving inquiry along three lines, those of 1) interactions among the formal learning institution

and these other agencies and groups, 2) student interactions with other organizations, such as

government and non-government agencies and groups, and 3) student and instructor interaction

with the institution. I will start with questions about the first.

Interactions among the formal learning institution and these other agencies and groups

To gain an understanding of interactions among institutions and other groups and agencies, I

would suggest asking “What are the formal and informal linkages among the institution,

professional associations, advocacy groups, NGOs, and government agencies?” and “How are

these linkages enacted to provide opportunities for students to interact with and participate in the

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activities of these?” Further, “Are we able to identify, value, reward, support, and encourage

enactment of these linkages with the involvement of instructors and institution staff?” I would

like to make an underlying assumption of mine explicit, and suggest questions to inquire into the

validity of this assumption: I expect that an awareness of and involvement in the practices of

other groups affects institutional practices, and affects decisions on the design of not only

curriculum in general, but specifically on what technologies are provided or encouraged for

students to use, and how those technologies are demonstrated and applied in assignments and

projects. Put another way, I expect that technology practices as well as values, priorities and

methods will cross-pollinate through these interactions, which might include visits, internships,

and the like. Whether this expectation is true is worth evaluating: “Are there technology choices,

methods and other cultural practices shared among the institutions and other groups?” and “What

are the mechanisms, benefits, and disadvantages of such sharing?” I am particularly interested in

these interactions at the level of the instructor. Understanding instructors’ professional

involvement in relevant practices can be thought of as a subset of the inquiry into institutional

linkages with organizations doing related work. It may be easy enough to assume an

individual’s—an instructor’s or staff member’s—professional involvement over time is an

authentic enactment of such cross pollination. I challenge this assumption based on my doubt

that the instructors employed to teach such rapidly-changing subject areas as digital media

production and environmental advocacy are always able to participate in professional and

volunteer activities enough to keep them abreast of the current issues and practices of the diverse

communities involved with media production and environmental causes. Michael’s comments

reinforce this concern. He is not compensated for the extra time and effort involved to undertake

this kind of assignment:

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Michael: I'm not being paid by the hour to do this, so in many respects this is absolutely,

this is an insane assignment for me to give to the class, because there's all kinds

of potential problems, there is, you know, I'm receiving e-mails at midnight

and everything else. And I'm not being paid to do this. It demands potentially, a

tremendous amount of time from that, on behalf of the instructor. That's not

guaranteed, but you have to, if things go awry, and so the ideal situation is that

whoever is leading this, I mean, has the time to devote to this assignment. I

mean, I did it because I thought it was interesting, rather than because [the

institution] asked me to do interesting things which I guess is sort of an

unwritten expectation.

Further, he had little experience in associated practices of video production or teaching video

production:

Michael: So, my, my interest in video it's not so much because I know anything about

video, because I didn't know a lot at all. I was just trying to find a way that

would capture interest, and creativity, and enthusiasm amongst the

students…The only reason why I even considered something like this to begin

with is because I have a friend who … asked me to volunteer one time. She

was volunteering in helping put together a music video. And it was, I mean it

was a full on, it was no different from the people that you see around campus

with a white trucks and everything else. There were all kinds of people with

their jobs all going at their little thing. And so all of a sudden I was seeing this

world from the inside. And this black box had just been opened up entirely.

And I had no idea what I was going to do right before I arrived, but before I

left I was doing actual, real [work], somebody's real job. Out in the world

somebody actually gets paid to do what I did. And so watching all this unfold, I

thought oh, my gosh. That's not very difficult. That's not very complicated at

all, right? … So I thought okay, well if it's that simple, why not inflict this on

the students? [Laughs] … I did not really have any experience beyond this one

concentrated weekend working on this music video.

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So, instructors’ professional involvement as a way to support and enhance teaching practice is

not a given, and needs to be better understood.

Student interactions with other organizations

Returning to consider the second item, student interactions with other organizations, such as

government and non-government agencies and groups, I suggest assessing “To what extent are

students provided with opportunities to learn from and interact with organizations and groups

involved in the professional and advocacy practices related to the issues and methods assigned in

the student projects?” I am aware of the existence of co-operative education programs, and I

would offer that consideration of the pedagogy of co-op programs should be given more priority.

“When students are placed with an organization or group involved in work relevant to their

studies, what are the teaching and learning practices associated with these placements, and how

are they validated and improved?” This is meant to be a constructive challenge, in that I wonder

whether four- and eight-month-long placements are the most effective learning opportunities for

students. “Are there potential benefits to learning in placement models such as community-

service learning and problem-based learning in field settings?” Underlying these questions about

the structure of student involvement with real-world work are some fundamental concerns that

should be borne in mind in future research: “What are the learning objectives associated with the

internship placement, who sets them, and how are they affected by student and instructor

involvement with organizations and groups other than the institution of formal record?” These

are ongoing concerns of relevance and value as much as of curriculum and policy, which, in my

opinion, should be foregrounded and openly discussed both in research and in practice.

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Student and instructor interaction with the institution

To inquire further into issues of student and instructor interaction with the institution, I first note

Michael’s comment about difficulty arranging support for the students, and the problem of

calibrating support provided to student needs.

Michael: It was much more difficult for me to provide technical support, for that, which

is, I can't even remember how I, I was groping around on campus…. I reserved

equipment for them on campus, and as a matter of fact, me going around and

getting my hands on access to equipment was a complete and total waste of my

time. I spent so much time trying to make sure, to communicate things with

[the departmental technology support unit] and say okay this is my class: I

gave them the list of names and student numbers so they could sign out

cameras, I reserved computer lab time for them…And, as it turns out, really,

they never used any of that right?...none of them used [school] hardware to

really do anything. I think a few of them signed out cameras. All of the editing

took place on their own computers in dorm rooms and wherever else they

were.

Michael’s efforts to arrange equipment and support were not calibrated to the students’ needs

and practices, possibly because it is very difficult to know what students will need in any given

year. While it may be the case that students would have used different forms of technology and

support if they had been available, they did not avail themselves of what was available in this

case. Does this mean that there is no need for technology support, such as equipment loans and

training for students? I would think it worthwhile to ask “What are students’ expectations of

technology support?” and “What kinds of equipment, training, scheduling, storage, working

space, and other facilities should be provided?” Further, “Who should be the support providers

for students?” and “By what mechanisms can support arrangements be calibrated to student

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needs?” Again, underlying issues need to be kept in mind, particularly “What forms of value and

benefit, if any, are demonstrable as a result of institutional support for student technology

projects?” and “How can support be provided that does not necessarily displace disciplinary and

subject matter concerns with technology training?” There is a potential dilemma in this area,

namely that it is possible that we might resort to a model of standardized technology support

widely available to students, incorporated into the culture of the institution, but that this model

could provide both the benefit of familiar equipment and methods, and the disadvantage of a

cumbersome, out-of-date, self-perpetuating technology support enterprise that loses agile

responsiveness to student and disciplinary needs. A clear evaluation of “Centralized or

decentralized technology support?” will likely be one of the more elusive and debatable areas for

ongoing research.

Michael notes above “All of the editing took place on their own computers in dorm rooms and

wherever else they were.” This and some other comments indicate that he did not know where

students were doing their work. Where students did their work and where they obtained their

resources was a topic discussed with student participants in some detail during interviews. The

two students from the course who participated in interviews were asked to draw as well as

describe verbally where they did their work and where they obtained resources for their projects.

Student comments indicated use of public spaces on campus, such as residence common areas

and coffee shops, for group meetings and project work, as well as in dormitory rooms, as

Michael guessed. While the map drawings are raw data not easily reproduced, those segments of

the interviews were useful in gaining a sense of the variety of places students went to obtain

ideas as well as equipment. One of the student groups took a long transit ride together, spent time

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brainstorming on the bus ride, and then wandered a large shopping centre, where their ideas

developed more specifically. Eventually they made a sock puppet theatre and did the acting and

video recording in a campus residence commons area. An excerpt from the map / interview data

indicates “bus to [shopping centre]: brainstorming > at [shopping centre] store; there, puppet

mittens > let’s use sock puppets > ate at restaurant” (Tara). The interview transcript matching

this part of the map drawing exercise includes the mention of the location: “We were at a

restaurant. It was after that glove thing, or what ever. And then we went back, basically. And that

was it. That's where our ideas came from” (Tara). Another student, James. indicated that he and

his group conducted all of their research using internet sources, and used their own equipment

for video recording and editing. These small excerpts do not depict the breadth of actual activity

of the whole class, or even of the groups to which interview participants belonged. However

these excerpts suggest useful questions: “Where could students be conducting their research,

production, and post-production?” and “What kind of contexts are available at present that

students may or may not make use of?” Further, “What influences student decision-making about

where to obtain help, inspiration, and equipment?” and “What ongoing or previous projects

could students participate in as learners, interns or assistants?” More basic level questions need

to address “What value or benefit, if any, is there to students in accessing resources such as

mentoring, technical troubleshooting support, and equipment?” and “What possible institutional

and non-institutional forms might such support take?” These questions lead me back to Wenger’s

notions of communities of practice and Lave and Wenger’s concepts of apprenticeship and

situated learning. Applying these concepts to the environmental education / media production

activities I studied, I begin to wonder “Are relevant structures, analogous to Wenger’s

communities of practice, in place?” and “To what extent are there opportunities for students to

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participate in these where they exist?” Further, “Is there value in engaging students with both

institutional and outside communities of practice, if they do exist?” These echo earlier questions

regarding participation in professional, government, and non-government organizations and

groups. This convergence emphasizes the rich potential of further research into student

participation in activities that are real-world enactments of the issues and practices they are

meant to be learning about in formal settings. A further development of this line of questioning

brings me to ask more exploratory questions about ways of understanding the nature and

enactment of learning, as both individual and collective activities, particularly with respect to the

idea of developing, through research into practices and configurations of learning systems, what

I might call a literacy of learning systems among researchers and educators. I am not so much

suggesting that researchers and educators do not understand their work, but that there seems to

be opportunity to understand better “What different kinds of configurations of learning systems

exist, and how do these function, in descriptive terms?” and further “Are there ways to choose

configurations of learning systems to better suit different kinds of educational intentions and

objectives?”

Looking forward

These questions are pressing in a time of rapidly changing issues and technologies. Does it make

sense to teach environmental education through digital video projects? Are we able to develop

more sophisticated understanding of what we as educators and researchers could be doing, based

more in a dynamic research and learning program that supports a conversation between practice

and research and enacts the dynamics of subject material in ways that we can choose and explain

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with a collective and effective rationality, one which may make use of but no longer rely quite so

heavily on trial and error?

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Conclusion

We’re pretty sure environmental problems deserve high priority. We try a few things to get

students to participate more actively in their learning about these issues. Predictably, we get

mixed results. We wonder, what next? Is this worth trying again? What would we change? We

make some adjustments and we try again. I have taken this approach myself in developing

curriculum and practice. It’s commonly referred to as being a reflective practitioner. I don’t

believe it is enough. There is a need to incorporate collective, collaborative, participatory,

research phases into reflective practice. Is it possible there are processes by which practitioners,

researchers, and students can work closely together in identifying what they need to do, what

they are able to do, how they are to do it, and with whom? Specific to the study topic, when

students make videos in the process of learning about the environment, how will students,

instructors, and researchers learn better, and improve processes as well as outcomes? What is

important now is to validate priorities, indicators, and measures as well as subjective outcomes. I

suggest an approach that is coherent with this study’s basis in knowledge as co-construction. In

teaching and learning, this knowledge is further constructed by iterative, collective, reflective

engagement with practical problems. Action is the natural extension of knowledge, and

iteratively, the converse is true. There are two steps in this extension of knowledge into action to

which this thesis contributes: 1) choices of action, in the form of questions to focus research, and

2) ways of enacting these choices. It may be possible for an individual to undertake research

based on the questions posed. However, I see more value in a collective effort, perhaps one that

is loosely-connected but with rich information flow and collaborative ties.. An overall model is

analogous to the idea of a collaborative studio. There may be different projects underway, but

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certainly the people working on those projects will consult one another on goals and solutions to

problems. A collective undertaking to better understand how teaching and learning about the

environment using video should be more than just a collection and analysis of data. It should be

an enactment of the collective knowledge, and an extension of the capabilities of the group. The

questions posed are offered, therefore, in the spirit of collectively developing better

understanding of what is important (choices), and in practicing the ability to enact those choices

as they are developed.

This is the stage of a thesis to summarize unifying concepts, and offer a sense of closure. I must

respectfully refuse to do so, on the principle that there is little need for contentment with the

apparent state of understanding of how video production might work in environmental education.

I will, however, suggest by way of summary a few issues about which we might be especially

discontented.

Most learning situations, especially those involving media production and environmental issues,

are inherently complex. But it makes no sense to focus too much discontent on this complexity

since eliminating complexity completely would defeat the pedagogical purpose of learning how

to deal with complex problems. If there are problems among students with engagement of the

subject material, this does not warrant the bulk of our concern either, at least not directly, for a

lack of engagement is more of a symptom of a problem. Nor is the solution to focus efforts on

cataloging and solving every last problem, for these will change and emerge anew in different

forms. More productively, we should be concerned, and perhaps quite vigorously concerned,

with the capacity of our learning systems to adapt to change. Through this study it has become

apparent to me that individual responses to complex, changing situations are not going to be

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enough to bring the full value of media technology to bear on environmental concerns. It is in

collective capacity that we will build and retain both competence and adaptability. But perhaps

we know this intuitively already, and seek specific steps toward enacting this collective capacity,

while still fostering initiative. The paradox is that specific steps are not equivalent to adaptive

capacity. A way forward comes from blending wisdom from each of the two disparate fields of

technology and environmental studies: in both, ecological knowledge is a key to adaptive

success. In practice this means fostering ecological knowledge of both the technological and the

human systems that support media production, and fostering ecological knowledge of “the

environment,” however that may be defined for a specific learning purpose. Obviously students

need to develop their ecological knowledge of technology resources: Where is everything? Who

does what, and for whom? What resources can I access? How do I learn to use them, and from

whom? And, of course, students need to develop their knowledge of the ecosystems they study.

If we are to take seriously this concern, then it will be just as obvious that instructors, their

colleagues, and the institution’s administration will benefit from valuing this complementary

complex of ecological knowledge. Further, instructors need to develop not just their own

collection of ecological knowledge. A pedagogy of ecological knowledge must be a part of their

skill sets. This is not to say that technological systems are equal to ecosystems; however, we are

driven by the fundamental principle of environmental studies to recognize that they are

interconnected. Ecology has changed. Technology has become part of our ecosystems, and

media has become part of environmental studies. So we will need to change our approach to

both. Before students undertake to make a show about the environment for school, we will need

to collectively share deeper, more habitual, and more explicit practices of introducing one

another to the ecosystems that are relevant to our efforts. This means active information-

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gathering and participation in both fields, media production and environmental work. By

learning about and participating in the real-world ecosystem as a matter of course, students,

instructors, and institutions will be better-equipped to adapt to meet the challenges of the future.

The strange synergy of environmental education with digital media technology, where

complexity, interdependency and interconnectedness challenge our capabilities as researchers

and as humans, leaves us plenty of room for error. The extent to which these errors are solvable

or repairable is one of the greatest uncertainties facing our generation. As much as trial and error

teaches us, further study into deliberately building interconnection and interdependency into our

awareness and into our practices will help us to adapt. For environmental education to serve

purposes of citizenship, sustainability, nourishment, and inherent value, it needs to grapple with

its relations with new technologies in explicit, conscious and informed ways. Technology

adoption does not just happen, any more than academic success or progress in research just

happens. As we undertake to adapt our institutions and practices of learning, it is my sincerest

hope that further research into the questions developed here will yield some configurations and

arrangements that work better—toward goals for learning not just as individuals, but as a species.

I would like to take few moments to focus and reflect. There are a few key ideas to take away

from this thesis. Co-construction of knowledge, as an enactment of community, could be a way

of recursively challenging assumptions while maintaining the lessons learned in the convergence

of the rapidly changing fields of environmental education and digital media production. Real-life

practice in both fields, for students and instructors could be a necessary part of ensuring

relevance and efficiency of learning experiences. And the approach to studying and working with

institutional configurations must be more sophisticated to meet the challenges of complexity and

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change. The thesis has been a vehicle to finding these general concepts and to elaborating a

collection of specific questions that can be applied to other settings. These questions are a bit of a

Trojan horse: I hope to start some conversation. In an age where accountability and measurement

are in fashion, questions are popular when they can provide measurements and correlations. It is

my hope that the some of the questions arrived at in this thesis might be tried out in settings

where environmental education can benefit from attention, and as a result of asking,

conversations will be started about just how much technology work there really should be in a

given teaching and learning situation.

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Appendix A: Assignment Handout

-------------- Digital Video Assignment: Ecological Footprint Public Service Announcement. Instructors: ------------- and --------------. Goals. By completing this assignment you will be able to: • use a video camera and digital video editing software • divide a large project into separate tasks and negotiate the distribution of work • display your understanding of theory from our class and incorporate it into a practical application You will be given limited resources to complete this project, possibly the most precious of which is the very limited time. Keep your design as simple as possible. Don’t be too ambitious. The Project. There will be four components for this project. A research proposal, a personal diary, a digital video and a presentation to the class. Each member of your team should contribute to all steps of the process. Assume the identity of an environmental non-governmental organization with an interest in sustainability issues. Research the Ecological Footprint model (you were introduced to the model in lecture on Sept 10th). What more can you learn about how the model is being used to affect positive change? Can you identify any strategies that do not appear to already be in use? Your ultimate goal is to produce an original 60 second public service announcement on the subject. The context can be here on campus or in society more generally. How can these concepts be used for good? Create a video to communicate the essence of the model and it’s potential application. While the initial audience will be your instructors and peers, we will upload our videos to the --------------website, YouTube, etc. For this reason, all material you use must be original and created by your group. This is to say, you cannot use a commercial recording as a soundtrack, and you cannot splice in copyrighted video from some other source. You can use open source content, but it must be credited. Similarly, do not film anybody without their permission. Do not try to film on private property. Please, no swearing, no violence. The Process. Each individual should keep a private, running diary of your experiences, to be handed in with your group’s final product. This is a document for you and your instructors, and is not meant to be read by your fellow group-members. The diary should not be written in one sitting at the very end, but rather as appropriate throughout the process! As the project

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The Process. Each individual should keep a private, running diary of your experiences, to be handed in with your group’s final product. This is a document for you and your instructors, and is not meant to be read by your fellow group-members. The diary should not be written in one sitting at the very end, but rather as appropriate throughout the process! As the project progresses, detail in your diary how your team managed the work. What was done by each team member? Did you work effectively as a team? How did you ensure tasks could be done in parallel? The first step is Research. Independently, each group member should research the Ecological Footprint model and brainstorm some ideas for your video’s “plot.” This research and the video ideas should be no longer than one page. Email your one-page to your fellow group members, and then meet to decide on which aspects you will focus, and to determine your video’s message. As a group, discuss who your target audience is, and what you want to communicate. What should your video achieve, and how? Specify how you will evaluate your success upon completion. Step two is to assemble an outline with two columns. The first column should indicate message, text, plot summary, voiceover, or the like; the second column should describe the visual that will accompany the idea already described. Be realistic about what you can hope to accomplish with the visuals. Be prepared to explain why you chose your final design. In your diary, discuss the design procedures that you have gone through to produced your work. Third, produce a timeline, including projected jobs and tasks, and who will likely do them. Important dates to include: Sept 10-19, research and brainstorming. Before Sept 15, meet as a group. Due in class Sept 19, group proposal including storyboard with two columns. Sept 22 - 28th shooting film. Sept 29-Oct 9th editing and production. Final product due for presentation in class on Oct 10th—the CAP Nature & Society Film Festival! At the end of your video, include a credits screen identifying this as a ----------- ----------- ----------- Program, Nature & Society Stream, ----------- ----------- project, detailing who did what. Make any other acknowledgements as required (not included in the one-minute time cap). There will be a prize for the best PSA, as voted by your peers. The rest of the class will evaluate your group’s work based upon: fulfilment of the requirements a clear and easily understandable message innovative use of the video medium how well your project matches your target audience

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Marking Rubric: Individual Ecological Footprint research (5%) and group proposal (5%). Project Dairy (10%) and Completed Video (10%). Group 1: ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, Group 2: ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, Group 3: ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, Group 4: ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, Group 5: ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, Group 6: ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, Group 7: ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, Group 8: ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, Group 9: ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, Group 10: ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------, ----------- -----------,

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Appendix B: UBC Research Ethics (BREB) Certificate