Navigating Physical and Epistemic Landscapes: An Analysis of Novice and Senior Geologists' Movement Through Wilderness Settings

• In Event: Movement, Environment, and Meaning in Learning

Abstract

Novices’ construction of knowledge and skills is multi-dimenisional: It occurs within physical and social spaces, engages with various forms of materiality, and begins from embodied perspectives that are interconnected and intertwined. This is especially true with enskilment in scientific fields as knowledge and skills here are highly interconnected with specialized cultures, spaces, as well as practices, tools, and signs.

Field geologists learn in extensive and heterogeneous wilderness settings. The material and textual inscriptions produced therein begin with the geologist’s movement through these landscapes, alone or with others. Through this movement analytical categories like schist (a metamorphic rock) are simultaneously 'signs' brought into the field as well as artifacts found in the field. Through this movement they act as mediators in the geologists’ engagement with the landscape, transforming how it appears to the geologist. This study examines how the geologists’ movement through landscapes plays an integral part in the accomplishment and learning of fieldwork and contributes to the discipline as a domain of knowledge and community of practice.

The data come from a video-recorded ethnography of a geology capstone field course, wherein the students were assessed in various methods related to geological sub-fields. The specific course presented here is from the metamorphic module, where among other tasks the participants are expected to find, identify, and map metamorphic folds over a large territory. The data consists of 18 hours of video of students and instructors as they conduct the land survey. The data was analyzed using conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974) with a focus on embodied interaction (Goodwin, 2000). I will specifically report on the interaction between bodies and environment in an exchange in which novice geologists alter their interpretation of a geologic fold based on the competing points of view they develop as distinct bodies in space.

Embodiment is conceptualized here primarily through the lens of a moving body. Following Merleau-Ponty's description, the body is not conceived as a substance but as a point of articulation where the world is joined and/or divided, making the body what he calls the "measurement of the world" (Merleau-Ponty, 2003, p. 24). As the geologist moves, the landscape is continuously articulated and re-articulated. What appears as a phenomenon of interest in one moment and in one location is mediated by what appeared as items of interest for the participants in other moments and other locations. As a meaningful phenomenon--or a collection thereof--the landscape continuously is articulated and articulates the participants' subsequent perception. As a result, perception is neither a product of just the perceiver nor of just the landscape, but something that emerges in the interaction between (Carusi and Hoel, 2014, p. 212).

The educational implications of this study suggest that rather than re-using essentialist ontologies that begin with pre-constituted entities as their starting points (ibid, p. 209), field courses would better emphasize processual strategies that highlight participants’ physical and perceptual relations to phenomena.

Author

• Michael Smith, University of California - Los Angeles