Place-based education is crucial to the way we understand and absorb different educational topics. By grounding the topic in a familiar location, it’s easier for the student to relate to the topic on a personal level, and it’s easier to introduce new things because those things will already be tied to the student’s prior knowledge. This is true of when studying science in a certain place, because we understand that because nature works one way in one location, it might work similarly or differently in a different location. For example, during BioBlitz, our guide told us that sometimes the frogs come out after a light rain, and they’d mostly be around ponds or up in trees. With this knowledge, we know that frogs might also populate ponds or trees in other forested regions, likely ones where it might rain. Learning about science in a certain place can allow us to make inferences about the rest of the world.

The Petitpas article discussed service learning, a way that place-based learning stimulates learners by making them a part of the upkeep and the maintenance of a certain place. What it does is feed a student’s desire to be a part of something greater; to contribute to a mechanism or a world that couldn’t exist the same way without them. This is a very interesting concept, one that I’m certain would instill in the student a respect for community service. At my high school, we were mandated to do two hours of community service every week. I worked in the video office at my school, and I was a valuable part of the program – I did routine maintenance on all the equipment, kept the office tidy, shot necessary b-roll for school projects, logged video and tapes, etc. Without me or the other students in the program, it would be hard to keep the film program at the school running smoothly, so we were a necessary constituent. At the same time, we learned a lot of aspects of digital videography and filmmaking, all things that fall under the categories of photographic and computer science. Thus, place-based education contributed to my education, while feeding a need to feel necessary.

What really interested me about the second reading was the idea of critical pedagogy. The definition of it, as provided by Burbules and Berk, is that it’s essentially a way of working with students to understand how they internalize institutionally enforced modes of self-doubt that would inevitably obstruct their abilities to think, learn, and excel. This tends to be rooted very strongly in place. This explains why children in deprived regions (the inner city, lower-income neighborhoods) are find themselves so behind. They are in a desert of deprivation when it comes to economic, and therefore educational, resources, what with underfunded schools and lack of enrichment opportunities, and this directly affects their ability to learn about science and to learn about themselves. Thus, critical pedagogy’s intent to educate students on these realities, these social and economic constructions that exist to keep them shackled, is a necessary one, and that direction of study is very practical. Sister Souljah, a hip-hop artist and activist in the 90’s, proclaimed how the institutions set up by such minds as Cornel West and Tony Brown to enrich young African-Americans were not effective because they did not educate on “the history of African people…[the fact] that America is business and without business [they] will have nothing and be nothing…[and] how to organize business so that [they] would be able to develop institutions in [their] own community.” Essentially, what she is arguing is that these institutions are lacking critical pedagogy; they try to treat a symptom without treating the disease. They do not explain how place creates situations based on social, political, and economic conditions. I think Sister Souljah would agree with the quote from Haymes that it’s necessary to “establishing pedagogical conditions that enable blacks in the city to critically interpret how dominant definitions and uses of urban space regulate and control how they organize their identity around territory, and the consequences of this for black urban resistance”.

Communication is a very important aspect of informal science learning. Simply by virtue of bouncing ideas off another person, one can come to really assess and analyze the information before them and create new ideas about it. We see this in the example of the Frogs exhibit, wherein the visitors discuss the possibility of the frogs camoflauging themselves or burying themselves. They bring their own knowledge of what some animals do to the present conversation and, as a result, they formulate new inferences and ideas about the exhibit they see before them. This ties back to the previous chapter’s discussion about the importance of prior knowledge. When studying the way these kids converse, it’s probably important for the experiment conductor to be able to differentiate between when the kid expresses prior knowledge, when the kid makes an observation, and when the kid makes an inference based on either one or some combination of both. This is probably where “Perceptual Talk” comes into play. By paying attention to it, you can tell that the kids are making observations and thoughtufully synthesizing them to form new ideas about what they’re looking at. This then becomes committed to prior knowledge, and will help them understand the next exhibit.

There were parts of this chapter where I hoped they’d perhaps get more in depth about what they were discussing. For example, when they were talking about people having pre-existing variables that change the way they talk about science. The argument was that the disparity in educational backgrounds between people will cause people to think about data in different ways, create different inferences, come to different conclusions, and most of all, discuss science and science information in different ways. The chapter went on to discuss how this can make it difficult for conversation observers. Now, this may be because I’m a Humanities student to the core, but this led me to wonder about the sociological implications of this argument. If we’re discussing people’s “backgrounds”, then where do race, class, and gender come into how we discuss science? In an earlier chapter I discussed how these things might affect how we learn science. Then, by extension, shouldn’t they also affect how we talk about it? Is this something scientists commonly think about when listening to how people discuss science? It’s fine if they don’t, I’m just curious.

I got confused when the chapter started talking about “supporting learning”. The chapter started by discussing how people learn best when they learn together. For example, a child and an older sibling watch an educational television show and the older sibling explains what they just learned to the younger sibling, and now they both understand what they’ve seen. How does this differ from “supporting” the younger sibling? I assume it means that the older sibling would take a more peripheral role, not directly telling the younger sibling what’s happening but instead guiding them to make the conclusion themselves, but it doesn’t seem that much different. If we’re talking about in an activity or classroom setting where the parent or teacher creates an environment that supports creative science thinking, doesn’t that remove the conversation element, unless the parent is speaking directly with the student? Or am I just not reading closely enough? Perhaps the distinction between “conversation” and “support” is that “conversation” implies concurrent learning (both parties learning at the same time), while “support” means one person helps the other learn. Does that mean that the supporter already knows the material? Or do they not have to?

I agree with the arguments made by this chapter that prior knowledge has a lot to do with how learners in informal settings process new information. In a lot of ways, prior knowledge is how novice learners become motivated as well. For example, we saw that with the boy who visited the physics exhibit on the first page. He says that he expected the air stream to die down and the weight to overcome the air pressure. He knows beforehand that air is not a solid, and that oftentimes movement streams decay over time. Because he had that knowledge of air, he was able to commit to memory the fact that the air didn’t do what he expected, and the reasons why. In that way, as well as others, prior knowledge can serve as an important tool in informal science learning.

I think interactive exhibits are the most conducive to learning, especially for people who prefer hands-on methods of study. I think the Citizen Science project I construct is going to have to be as hands-on as possible in order to keep people interested. That being said, the textbook makes a good point in saying that too many interactive features can overwhelm the participant. Ergo, instead of adding more and more features, it’d likely make more sense to provide the participant with responsibilities. I’d have to immerse the participant fully in the investigation, possibly by making them solely responsible for the administration of the experiment and the collection of its data. The more one trusts a participant with responsibility for an activity, and the more directly hands-on one makes the activity, the more fun it’ll likely be for the participant.

Furthermore, perhaps adding an element of competitiveness is important to motivating, engaging, and interesting participants. When discussing the Downhill Race project, I was surprised that the text didn’t address that. The level of intrigue that comes from studying the physics of the rolling disks can’t go ignored, but it’s the competitive element that will most likely draw in children. If we were to create a Citizen Science project that were oriented towards children, competition might be a useful tool to use.

I really don’t like to be the only one in class who never has anything insightful to offer in my responses or anything good to say about the reading. That being said, I just don’t really see the value in the strands. Once I deconstruct through the endless comma chains and polysyllabic terms and understand exactly what it is I’m reading, what I essentially get out of it is: “Get interested. Know some things. Do some things. Think about some things. Work together with other scientists in scientific ways. Develop scientific identities.” Most of that seems really…obvious? Well, except for the last one. Maybe I’d develop a scientific identity if I were really interested in engaging in scientist, but then again, I’m a stubborn piece of work. And I’m also not an elderly retired man in search of hobbies. Essentially what I’m getting at is that the strands seem like a pretty basic approach to scientific learning? I mean, that seems like how most science is taught. Granted, it’s not always successful in every respect (it’s not always possible to spark excitement in someone who isn’t willing to learn).

However, it’s very possible I may be misinterpreting what was written, or more so, I may be underestimating the depth of what was written in this chapter, and the actual educational and motivational power of the strands. Motivation seems like the key issue at hand, because without motivation, it doesn’t seem like there’s any foundation for the rest of the strands. I fear that those who are unmotivated at first will simply remain unmotivated. I’ve seen it happen many times, and I’m as guilty of it as anyone else. Perhaps it requires a latent, untapped motivation that needs to be dug out and set ablaze by a certain teacher or enthralling topic? Perhaps it requires the student to stop being so stubborn for once in his/her life? Perhaps.