Students' Onto-Epistemic Navigation in Learning About Plants in Forest Ecosystems

• In Event: Designing Learning for Just, Sustainable, and Culturally Thriving Futures: Engaging Complex Socio-Ecological Systems in Place

Abstract

Objectives
This study investigates the onto-epistemic navigation amongst youth and adults during activities focused on understanding the role of plants in forest ecosystems and estuaries as well as with people across time. These learning environments deliberately worked to support sense-making between Indigenous ways of knowing and western ways of knowing. This study analyzes a series of such onto-epistemic navigations and characterizes the pedagogical practices that enabled or constrained such navigations. Finally this paper proposes a set of design principles derived from the analysis.

Perspective/Theoretical Framework
I view learning as a social phenomenon constituted in the experienced, lived-in world, through participation in the ongoing practices of social and cultural communities (Nasir et al, 2006; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Further, researchers are increasingly acknowledging the emplaced and embodied nature of such learning (e.g. Pink, 2008). Such lived-in worlds manifest multiple onto-epistemic forms of activity (Bang & Marin, 2014). In this paper I suggest that these navigations also include axiological positionings. Lemke (2002) argues that axiological positionings are a routine dimension of human activity. I argue that the nature of such navigations are sites of possible innovations and historical re-mediations but also sites that can reproduce normative powered relations.

Data/Methods
The data for this paper is drawn from a series of activities focused on understanding the role of plants in forest ecosystems and estuaries and utilizes knowledge and interaction analytical methods. Data includes audio and video recordings. The video recordings consist of both point of view video data from 2 youth as well as video from a broader perspective. These variations in perspective in the data allows for an analysis of embodied and perspectival onto-epistemic navigation.

Findings
Findings suggest that there were four dimensions that supported onto-epistemic navigations in youth and teacher sense-making. These include 1) the use of storytelling, particular Indigenous stories as well as engaging youth as storytellers, 2) interspecies perspective taking, 3) attentional toggling across scales, and 4) a conceptual focus on multiple non-linear relations. I explore how sense-making is shaped by each of these dimensions and the ways in which these dimensions are achieved collaboratively between youth and teachers as well amongst youth on their own. In addition this analysis makes visible the ways in which axiological dimensions of sense-making is always intertwined with onto-epistemic navigation. Finally I report on the ways in which power and historicity shapes axiological dimensions in learning of complex socio-ecological systems.

Significance:
Designing equitable learning environments remains a central problem of education. This paper contributes to understanding new layers of what is required to develop equitable and just learning environments that can adequately meet the needs of the 21st century.

Author

• Megan Bang, University of Washington