Designs for Experimentation and Inquiry

Approaching Learning and Knowing in Digital Transformation

Åsa Mäkitalo, Todd E. Nicewonger, Mark Elam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138592735
• eBook ISBN: 9780429953088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Designs for Experimentation and Inquiry examines how digital media is reconfiguring the established worlds of research, education and professional practice. It reflects on the theoretical, methodological and ethical issues shaping contemporary engagements with digital learning and offers insights for both analysing and intervening in digital learning practices.

This insightful volume fills a gap in the current literature by bringing together experiences from Sociocultural Studies of Learning, Science and Technology Studies, and Design Studies. Each chapter is an innovative case study, examining a different aspect of digital media's role in research, education and professional practice by exploring topics such as:

• Learning practices and digitalized dialogue

• Digital design experiments

• Digitally mediated collaborations

• Ethical digital inquiry and design

Expertly researched and written, this book is a unique resource for scholars, researchers and professionals working in the fields of digital design, applied technology and the learning sciences.

The Preface, and Introduction, as well as Chapters 3 and 5 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

PART I

Digital technologies, learning and forms of agency

1

CONCEPTS, MATERIALITY AND EMERGING COGNITIVE HABITS

The case of calculating carbon footprints for understanding environmental impact

Annika Lantz-Andersson, Géraldine Fauville, Emma Edstrand and Roger Säljö

Introduction

The interest behind the present study can be found at two levels. First, our aim is to show how what is commonly conceived of as acts of thinking and reasoning are grounded in materiality, in artefacts, and in what Donald (2010) refers to as symbolic technologies. Thinking (and learning) in this perspective implies engaging with symbolic technologies designed to provide access to human insights and experiences that have been generated over a long time and then built into artefacts. A corollary of this perspective is that human agency is shaped by the use of symbolic technologies, but the opposite is also true: technologies embody and exercise agency in social practices. Second, our aim is to illustrate some of the consequences of this perspective in the specific case of learning about the environment. More precisely, we will report a study of how students learn to understand, calculate and account for the environmental impact of their own daily activities. The symbolic technology they engage with is a so-called carbon footprint calculator (CFC), a tool for estimating carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. This study investigates how the use of a digital tool such as a CFC co-determines high school students’ ways of reasoning about their carbon footprint in the context of a global online discussion forum. In other words, our analysis concerns how students learn to understand what a carbon footprint is, and how it may be measured and related to how they lead their lives.

Symbolic technologies in the context of engaging with environmental issues

Through history many technological inventions have transformed the way we think, act and communicate (Säljö, 2016). The development of digital technologies and increasingly sophisticated tools for documenting, analysing and communicating information and knowledge that we now use implies that a growing number of artefacts are part of the flow of our cognitive activities. As Donald (1991) puts it, the human mind is best conceived as a “hybrid mind”, where symbolic technologies are part and parcel of meaning-making in all walks of life. Or, to put it differently, the human mind is not a stand-alone device; rather, it operates in symbiosis with external tools. Therefore, it is important to understand how such resources support learning and participation in society. It is simply no longer possible to analyse how people understand, reason or argue without taking into account their use of artefacts.

In the specific context of engaging with environmental issues, this point is illustrated by Marres (2012) in her work on what she refers to as material participation. In recent decades, there has been a range of attempts to stimulate public engagement with environmental issues in everyday practices. This has been done through initiatives and arguments that have the capacity to inspire, provoke and surprise in politically and morally significant ways. These attempts have been implemented, for instance, in the context of campaigns promoting sorting waste and avoiding using everyday material objects such as plastic bags when shopping. Also, there is currently a wide range of initiatives that seek to persuade people to buy rather complex artefacts that “environmentalize” household activities. These strategies entail a particular understanding of what participation is about: “rather than seeking to increase people’s knowledge about environmental issues, these initiatives focus on action and impact – on what people can do about the issues in question” (Marres, 2012, p. 3).

Climate change, environmental literacy and the concept of CFC

The example from the environmental area that we will be introducing is interesting for several reasons. First, climate change is currently recognized as one of the greatest threats to humankind (cf., e.g., Schneider, 2011). Recent rapid accumulation of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere due to human activities has resulted in severe damage to the environment (e.g. Hertwich, 2014; IPCC, 2013). However, even though awareness of climate change is widespread, people’s understanding of, and engagement in, mitigating still need to be strengthened (Whitmarsh, Seyfang & O’Neill, 2011).

Second, to increase people’s awareness of their own contribution to climate change, new symbolic technologies designed to be user friendly and informative emerge, and they provide access points (Giddens, 2002) and short-cuts to complex forms of knowledge. The technologies become entry points to developing science and environmental literacy needed to be able to responsibly engage with and act upon the environmental challenges we encounter. Science literacy, in this sense, concerns how scientific concepts and ways of reasoning about nature can be applied in the context of understanding our everyday life practices, rather than as mastering scientific facts and principles in the context of scientific discourse (cf. Whitmarsh et al., 2011). The interest in science literacy has been triggered by the assumption that knowledge has to be contextualized in such a manner that it has the power to inform everyday actions in complex and ambiguous everyday settings where people – acting as citizens – are exposed to conflicting messages, and where they have to balance different expectations. An example of a symbolic technology especially designed to enable engagement in such literacy practices is carbon footprint calculators (CFCs).

As a third point, one of the key affordances of an everyday technology of carbon accounting is that by using it, people have access to the rather abstract concept of CF. Such emissions are not visible to the human eye (cf., Edstrand, 2016), nor do we necessarily get any immediate feedback from our concrete behaviours. The materiality of CFCs thus offers a design that implies possibilities for people to conceptualize and understand some elements of the complexities of climate change. As a symbolic technology, it is an instrument of thinking that extends our capacities to structure the world and to realize the consequences of what we are doing (see below). More specifically, CFCs offer possibilities to foster an awareness of the environmental consequences of the users’ daily activities with the objective of encouraging a more informed lifestyle and a willingness to counteract emissions at an individual level (Peters, 2010; Schmidt, 2009).

The concept of Carbon Footprint, derived from the idea of an Ecological Footprint, was invented in the 1990s (Wiedmann, 2009). In the 2000s, CF emerged as an issue more broadly discussed in the public domain (Wright, Kemp & Williams, 2011). At a general conceptual level, CF is defined as the amount of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases that are induced by a person’s activities in a given time frame. However, the definition of CF is complex and contested, and there is an intense debate about exactly how to measure processes involved in carbon footprints by means of CFCs (Birnik, 2013; Peters, 2010; Wiedmann, 2009; Wright et al., 2011). At a technical level, CFCs are designed so as to be easy to use for anyone with a modest experience of computer interfaces. The basic idea is to present questions addressing users’ lifestyles (with respect to transportation, diet, heating systems of houses, purchases etc.). The answers are fed into the CFC. By reporting on their estimated concrete behaviours, the users receive a quantification of their CF in kilograms of CO₂ emitted per year. Thus, CFCs are symbolic tools that are grounded in how researchers analyse environmental impact, but they are designed for use by the general public. Furthermore, and this is an important point to keep in mind, calculating CF can be understood as a normative and political form of activity, where the technology interacts with the general societal debate, and in this sense blurs the boundaries between public and private responsibilities for environmental action (cf. Marres, 2012). Therefore the information received from a so-called input–output analysis (Wiedmann, 2009) should by no means be understood as a simple and unequivocal measurement and a final verdict about a person’s CF. Rather, the technology is a morally loaded educational technology that serves as a resource in a personal learning activity, but which rests on principles and assumptions that may be debated in their own right (Hertwich, 2014).

In this study we explore postings in an international online discussion forum, where students from several countries took part after having used a CFC as part of instructional activities. The aim is to analyse students’ meaning-making as they explore and articulate, a) their understanding of what a carbon footprint is, b) how the calculator mediates footprints, c) how they are able to see patterns and relationships and argue about them and, d) how they suggest enacting the insights derived from working with the CFC.

Learning about climate change through the use of carbon footprint calculators

Understanding climate change is a good example of the need to go beyond the subject matter of any one discipline when understanding nature. Climate change, clearly, is a challenging multidimensional issue that requires awareness of knowledge and perspectives that come from many disciplines, and it also presupposes the ability to engage in what in the literature is referred to as systems thinking (Sinatra et al., 2011; Sterman, 1994). The implication of systems thinking is that our assumptions about the network of causes, and our sensitivity to the various aspects of the problems, need to be grounded in a holistic and multilevel framework/perspective on an issue (Sterman, 1994).

In a recent review of the research literature on public perceptions of climate change, where 92 peer-reviewed articles appearing between 2000 and 2011 were examined, Wibeck (2014) highlighted the tensions between, on the one hand, public understanding and, on the other hand, public engagement, and she pointed to the thresholds that appear when we have to engage in systems thinking. The barriers to public engagement pointed to in the review had to do with, for example, limited or lack of understanding of the dynamics of systems, and an obvious confusion between climate change and other environmental problems, for example, the depletion of the ozone layer. In many of the studies analysed, the significance of framing climate change so that it would appear understandable to citizens was pointed to as central in order to enhance public engagement. Wibeck points to the importance of educators realizing that students’ actions are governed by their conceptions and beliefs. Her review also emphasizes the need to shift focus from public understanding at a general level to public engagement. In addition, Wibeck concludes that it is better to give positive feedback on individual actions with a focus on solutions, rather than to focus on catastrophic consequences of failures to handle the situation.

Within education and educational research, climate change is considered an instance of what is referred to as a socio-scientific issue (SSI). This implies that it exemplifies issues that are complex, and where we can expect no single straightforward solutions (Sadler, 2009; Sadler & Zeidler, 2005). Thus, learning about socio-scientific issues implies that students are expected to learn to analyse a complex problem under the assumption that it must be viewed from different perspectives, for instance from scientific, economic, social, legal and ethical perspectives. Informal reasoning is argued to be an important ingredient for students to use when engaging with socio-scientific scenarios. For example, Sadler and Zeidler (2005) conclude that “rationalistic, emotive and intuitive” (p. 122) forms of informal reasoning are important ingredients for students when resolving individual socio-scientific scenarios. A similar argument is presented by Öhman and Östman (2008), who point out that if ethical and moral issues are addressed in pluralistic perspectives in education about SSIs, the ensuing reasoning and reflections can be used as resources for enhancing students’ awareness, and ability to interact with people with opposing standpoints.

Theoretical framework

Theoretically the study builds on sociocultural perspectives where learning is seen as emerging through social interaction, and where participants learn by appropriating cultural tools (Vygotsky, 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Digital technologies, learning and forms of agency
• Part II: Digital design experiments and learning
• Part III: Investigating digitally mediated collaborations
• Part IV: Ethical digital inquiry and design