Voices to Hear: What Podcasts as a Storytelling Avenue Reveal About Systems Thinking

• In Event: Using Storytelling as an Approach to Researching, Teaching, and Learning About Complex Community-Based Socioscientific Problems

Abstract

Objectives
Voices to Hear (V2H), a design-based research project focused on the oral tradition of storytelling, empowers Native American students ages 12-25 to learn about complex environmental challenges faced by the Coeur d’Alene (CDA) community. Students create podcasts about environmental systems affecting their community like the impact of invasive Northern Pike on native Cutthroat Trout and the continued impact of historic silver mining on Tribal waters. Through this process, students learn about the problems at hand through the lens of different knowledge systems (Indigenous and Eurocentric) by hearing stories told by CDA Elders, explanations provided by natural resource scientists, and observations made by other community members. While the strength of podcast making is in resonance with Native American oral storytelling traditions, the V2H process also provides a mechanism for conducting scientific inquiry and reflection on the inherent complexities of socio-scientific challenges.

Data/Methods
This research focuses on student ability to systems think through the analysis of interviews, concept maps, and podcasts. Pre- and post- program data include student analysis of a pre-designed problem-based environmental story and concept maps as visual representation of the components that they saw as integral to solving the problem at hand. Data from podcasts focuses on how students chose to represent local environmental issues that are grounded in complex systems.

Analytic Framework
The V2H research examines how student program participants analyze complex systems that are embedded in a community with a rich cultural and environmental history. The CDA culture inherently emphasizes what they call the Core Values. As such, this research analysis uses the Core Values (CV) framework, which draws on five core values (stewardship, membership, guardianship, scholarship, and spirituality) that reflect the worldview and heart of the CDA Tribal people. Framing the analysis within these core values highlights relationship, protection, and care.

Results
The V2H program enables students to realize the interconnections within systems, as is revealed in their interviews, stories, and the podcast narratives. The data reveals that students value (1) caring that emphasizes responsibility, accountability, and social awareness in all spheres of life, (2) learning to understand the world by applying knowledge meaningfully in the community, and (3) care, responsibility, and protection for fellow people and natural resources. Meadows, Randers & Meadows (2004) posit that our increasing obsession with growth has resulted in the persistence of unsustainable environmental decision-making. We assert that CV, as a teaching framework, offers an ideal ideology approach to living that works to reinforce the notion that environmental systems are in a delicate balance which must be maintained in order for them to remain sustainable.

Scholarly significance
Learned science is often incompatible with students’ worldview forcing students to abandon or marginalize their way of thinking or knowing (Aikenhead & Jegede, 1991). As such, we explore how to leverage sociocultural worldviews and utilize pre-existing student schemas as cultural capital for systems thinking through our use of the CV framework. These findings will support development of culturally relevant frameworks for systems thinking education.

Authors

• Shakuntala Devi Gopal, University of Arizona

• Anne L. Kern, University of Idaho

• Rose E. Honey, Independent Consultant

• Julie Poynsenby, Coeur d'Alene Tribe of Indians

• Christine Meyer, Coeur d'Alene Tribe of Indians