Students' Epistemic Engagement in a Field-Based Environmental Sciences Watershed Investigation

• In Event: 63.036 - Young People Shaping Science Practice in and out of Classrooms: Implications for Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Guided by sociocultural perspectives on the importance of place and identity as part of learning, this analysis of students' epistemic agency is part of a larger inquiry into youths' engagement in a three-week stream study. In our larger project, we investigated high school students (n=76 ninth and tenth grade biology students) understandings of their community and water quality during a school- and community-based watershed unit. Data presented for AERA 2015 include field notes and video transcripts from a cross-case analysis of two small groups of learners, the Stream Mapping and the Macroinvertebrate groups. The setting is a rural, high-poverty school in Appalachian Pennsylvania that has adopted a one-to-one computing model. The study uses a theoretical framework that seeks to understand how cultural tools mediate participation in science practices and youths' identity development towards or away from science.
Through a theory-driven thematic analysis of video records from school and a field study in the students' community, as well as an analysis of digital photographs used on a student-produced wiki, we seek to understand how engaging in a experience in their community permitted different kinds of participation for youth. We address the following question: how did the participation in a stream study of the reservoir that fed the school's drinking water influence learners' thinking about science, their community, and themselves? The case highlights the successes and struggles youths had and perceived on their journey to understand the health of their community's watershed.
The study findings show that the case study students adopted digital photography as a cultural tool to support making scientific thinking visible to peers and adults, positioning themselves as scientific thinkers. Students also utilized digital photography to document their data collection and share their findings with peers in alignment with perspectives on participation science practices. While prior work has established that digital photographs and videos have captured youth's observations can be shared, annotated, and reviewed to support science learning, we also found the learners worked to take photographs as a means of positioning themselves as legitimate participants in scientific practices on their wiki page. Study implications include that digital photography can serve as a cultural tool that connects youth to community, youth to science, and youth to new views of themselves as capable learners. This study's significance is that it enriches existing accounts of how youths participate in science with an empirical example of youths engaged within their local community as epistemic agents, capable of understanding the complex local, socio-scientific issues related to water quality.

Authors

• Heather Toomey Zimmerman, The Pennsylvania State University

• Jennifer Lynn Weible, Central Michigan University