How Informal Educators Help Visitors Make Sense of an Interactive Zoo Exhibit

• In Event: 42.072 - Observational Methodologies Across Informal Learning Spaces

Abstract

Objectives. This project, part of the Climate Literacy Zoo Education Network (CLiZEN), aimed to investigate how informal educators known as interpreters model the sense-making process for visitors by making use of resources in exhibit spaces. Interpreters at informal institutions such as museums, zoos, aquariums, and science centers are tasked with revealing the significance of exhibits, objects, and places for visitors who are unaware of their underlying meanings.

Framing. When visitors approach an unfamiliar exhibit, they engage in sense-making behaviors such as gathering information, making inferences, and engaging in inquiry. We argue that interpreters enact many of these same behaviors, but for the purpose of modeling the sense-making process and making it visible for visitors. Drawing from literature on sense-making, we identify three core tasks that interpreters perform. These consist of identifying salient resources in the environment, connecting between related but differing resources to form “compounds” of resources that express complex ideas, and extending these resource compounds sequentially by introducing additional resources to provide an explanatory narrative. Using an activity theory framing, interpreters’ sense-making modeling is considered in the context of their individual and group goals, shared norms, division of labor, and mediating artifacts.
Setting. “A Mile in My Paws” (“Paws”), the focal exhibit for this study, is a resource-rich interactive exhibit that demonstrates the effects of climate change on arctic habitats. “Paws” was permanently installed at Brookfield Zoo in Illinois during summer 2014 and 2015. The exhibit casts visitors as polar bears in the past, present, and future, who must hunt for seals using motion controls to swim and walk. Researchers worked with the Roving Naturalists, interpretive staff at the zoo who run both daily chats and impromptu “roving” interpretive dialogues.

Methods. Data collection for this study involved multiple forms of qualitative methods. Daily chats at “Paws” were observed across the summer season, which were facilitated by a rotating paired crew of Roving Naturalists, causing “Paws” to be run by a different pair of interpreters each day. This allowed for both variation and commonality in which interpreters were observed. Using both video and audio recording equipment, researchers were able to observe interpreters’ enactment of the “Paws” chat, as well as listen in on the reflective and debriefing conversations that happened between interpreters before, during, and after the chat. This data was complemented by more extended and structured interviews, where researchers could seek interpreters’ in-depth explanations of their practice.

Findings. This work introduces “sense-making modeling” as a distinct practice that interpreters engage in when speaking with visitors about exhibit content. This concept helps illuminate the value both of resource-rich interactive exhibits, but also the unique role of human interpretation in informal contexts. We also present an analytic approach for moving from observational data of interpreted exhibits, to structured representations categorizing resource usage across time and for different pedagogical and sense-making purposes. These results lay the foundation for later work investigating the relative effectiveness of differing interpretive approaches for visitor learning, as well as for applications in interpreter professional development.

Authors

• Brian Slattery, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Leilah Lyons, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Priscilla Jimenez-Pazmino, University of Illinois at Chicago