"It Took Me Three Years to Get Here": Conjecture Mapping as a Tool for Identifying Essential Elements for Program Development

• In Event: Conjecture Mapping: New Approaches to Broadening Processes of Educational Design Research

Abstract

Purpose:
During the COVID 19 pandemic, the EEC graduate program at IslandWood was confronted by a series of external and internal challenges that pushed us to identify and name the goals of our program more clearly to respond to the changing contexts around us. We did so to meet the needs of our students and to quickly make decisions with the goal of keeping everyone safe and maximizing learning. Prior to the pandemic, our program was in a groove making minimal changes to a longstanding and successful formula, but as the pandemic raged, we needed to make changes to the program to create opportunities for the same high-level conjectures and outcomes. Responding to these challenges called for a review of many of our long-held embodiments and mediating processes to reach the same outcomes.

Framework:
Sandoval’s (2014) conjecture mapping paper offers design-based researchers an opportunity to learn more about the relationships between designed-elements e.g. tools/resources, or practices and intended outcomes. Sandoval (2014) considered conjecture maps as argumentative grammar for design-researchers to “support empirically grounded claims about the causal mechanisms of effective learning environments” (p. 20). In this paper I focus on conjecture mapping as a tool for shared meaning making across the interconnected elements of a graduate program. Given that conjecture mapping was designed to make ideas about learning explicit and to explore how ideas “function in interaction to promote learning” (p. 20), they are well suited to work to streamline design and practice with a focus on the ways that interactions between interconnected programs can promote learning.

Methods & Data:
This conceptual design piece explores the use of conjecture mapping to prompt high-level conversations amongst colleagues on an education team working to design and administer a graduate program nested within an environmental learning center serving 4-6th grade students and their families. I explore the following research question: How can conjecture maps function to re-mediate the iterative design of a graduate program nested within a residential environmental educational learning center?

Findings & Significance:
Early in my role as program director, I struggled to figure out how best to make conjecture mapping as a tool accessible to my staff who typically had limited engagement with learning theory and design-based research (DBR) methods. I hoped to build on these educators’ existing shared commitments and their individual philosophies of teaching through collaborative reflection and articulation of conjectures (see Figure 3). I built on similarities between iterative program design and DBR to introduce concepts, practices, and norms for our graduate students in ways that could support educators to make sense of these key ideas. Figure 1 makes clear how we used color-coding of specific conjectures (e.g. shared commitments) to both mission/vision and conjecture map categories. Reflection on conjecture maps as tools made our team explicate high-level conjectures connected to mission and vision, thereby allowing us to explore the ways that the tools, task structures, participant structures, and discursive practices created new opportunities for graduate student learning.

Author

• Déana Scipio, IslandWood