Experiential Learning Opportunities

The field trip to Eco-Hostel successfully served multiple functions and could have been placed in a number of columns in Table 5.1. A concept mapping exercise that introduced the field trip was briefly mentioned in Section 5.3.1, and the relevance and local application of science were also emphasized at Eco-Hostel. But in the interest of documenting another translation of theory into practice, the field trip is described here as an example of an opportunity for experiential learning. Experiential education has a long history and can be interpreted in many ways. I am an advocate of teaching to multiple intelligences and embrace a diversity of interpretations of experiential teaching and learning. During the overnight trip to Eco-Hostel, the students experienced: living on a developing permaculture property; walking through a large permaculture garden; seeing steam rise out of a compost heap; examining water retention swales up close; comparing infiltration rates of the garden soil to the compacted lawn next to the garden; walking around an energy efficient ―eco-bach,‖ and eating pizza cooked in a wood-fired earth oven. Each of these experiences represents varying degrees of applying science understanding and/or sustainable thinking.

Teacher‘s and students‘ responses to the field trip were very positive (see Chapter 6), some students reported learning science during the field trip (see Chapter 7), and many

students reported to enjoy learning science with an emphasis on the environment (Chapter 8). But this type of experiential learning was the exception during the intervention. For the most part, students sat at desks and took notes from the white board and data projector screen, or copied information from their course books into their notebooks (Classroom observations). In the classroom, I observed that the students spent a significant amount of class time writing - on some days over 50 percent of a class period (Classroom observation, 15-03-10). On three days when the teacher was absent, the students spent the entire periods copying questions from their course books into their notebooks while a substitute teacher sat at the front of the classroom. Including these 3 days, I estimate that of the total cumulative hours students spent in their science class, close to half of them were spent copying information from the white board, the data projector screen, or their course books into their notebooks (Classroom observations). On one occasion, the teacher emphasized how fortunate the students were to have a structured exercise such as copying notes. He pointed out to them that at no other time in their lives besides school would they have a time set aside to practice this skill (Classroom observation, 18/06/10). As the teacher stated, ―biology is seen as the science of learning names‖ (Teacher interview, 26/07/10), and he appeared to believe that the best way to achieve that was rote learning (Classroom observations). Data collected around students‘ responses to this transmissive pedagogy - what they called ―book work‖ - are discussed in Chapters 6 and 8. On the infrequent occasions when students were away from their desks and participating in experiential learning activities organized and run by the teacher alone, they worked in groups doing laboratory exercises such as the one described below.

During the first week of the Environmental Chemistry unit, the teacher split the class into boys and girls (12 of each) and asked them to form groups of four. He handed each group a sheet of paper with written instructions. It was not clear to me immediately that they were assigned different activities. The girls followed the instructions to make hokey pokey in an aluminium pie plate over a gas burner (Classroom observation, 05-03-10).

This activity was called ―Making CO2,‖ but it was not made clear by the teacher to the girls how or why carbon dioxide was ‗made‘ during the exercise.

While the girls got right into their activity, the boys remained seated for about five minutes not doing anything. Their activity was called ―CO₂ Investigation.‖ Once they did engage with the exercise, they followed written instructions to collect carbon dioxide in a plastic bottle and then set it in the sun and measure the temperature rise against a control bottle containing air. All three groups of boys appeared to be hung up on the step involving capturing carbon dioxide using a water trap. They seemed to be having great difficulty filling their plastic bottle with carbon dioxide, and spent much of their time splashing one another with water. So much time passed during their unsuccessful attempts at filling bottles with CO₂ that one group realized the end of class was approaching. One boy convinced his group that they should simply exhale into the bottle in order to fill it with carbon dioxide. After doing this, they sealed it with a rubber stopper housing a thermometer and placed it outside on the hot pavement next to a control bottle filled with air. But the class period ended before they were able to collect their temperature data. The other two groups of boys remained indoors at the sinks (Classroom observation, 05-03-10).

Regarding follow-up on these activities, during the next class period three days later the teacher presented a data set that he had constructed because the boys were unable to collect data from the exercise. He projected his data set onto a screen and asked the students to copy it down and then graph the temperature change vs. time for the bottle filled with CO2 and the bottle filled with air. After the students had sketched their own graphs in their notebooks, the teacher projected a graph he made on his computer and asked me to come to the front of the classroom and ―interpret‖ it for the students. I did this, and then the teacher asked the students to write their own graph interpretations in their notebooks. At the end of the class period, the teacher circulated through the students checking that each had made a graph and written an interpretation. He then dismissed them one at a time (Classroom observation, 08-03-10).

While the field trip to Eco-Hostel and the laboratory exercise described above can both be called experiential learning, their design, context and administration differ significantly. These important differences are examined in Chapter 9.