Publications

Online Manuscripts (see Quest Atlantis Pubs for other Current Work)

Situationally Embodied Curriculum: Relating Formalisms and Contexts
This study describes an example of design-based research in which we make theoretical improvements in our understanding, in part based on empirical work, and use these to revise our curriculum and, simultaneously, our evolving theory of the relations between contexts and disciplinary formalisms. Prior to this study, we completed a first cycle of design revisions to a game-based ecological sciences curriculum to make more apparent specific domain concepts associated with targeted learning standards. Of particular interest was using gaming principles to embed standards-based science concepts in the curricular experience without undermining the situative embodiment central to our design philosophy. In Study One reported here, the same first-cycle elementary teacher used the refined second cycle curriculum, again with high-ability fourth graders. We then analyzed qualitative and quantitative data on student participation and performance to further refine our theory and revise the curriculum. In Study Two, another teacher implemented a further refined second cycle curriculum with lower achieving fourth graders, including several students labeled as having special needs. We use the design trajectory and results to illustrate and warrant the creation of a situationally embodied curriculum that supports the learning of specific disciplinary formalisms. This appeared in Science Education.

Our Designs and the Social Agendas they Carry
Although the work of learning scientists and instructional designers has brought about countless curricula, designs, and theoretical claims, the community has been less active in communicating the explicit and implicit critical social agendas that result (or could result) from their work. It is our belief that the community of learning scientists is well positioned to build transformative models of what could be, to develop learning and teaching interventions that have impact, and to advance theory that will prove valuable to others. This potential, we argue, would be significantly heightened if we as a community embrace the critical agendas that are central to so many discussions in anthropology, philosophy, or even curriculum development more generally. Instead of simply building an artifact to help individuals accomplish a particular task, or to meet a specific standard, the focus of critical design work is to develop sociotechnical structures that facilitate individuals in critiquing and improving themselves and the societies in which they function, and then we use our understanding of participation with these structures to advance theory. As an example of critical design work, we describe the Quest Atlantis project and the methodology used in its creation. This article appeared in the Journal of the Learning Sciences.

Curriculum-Based Ecosystems: Supporting Knowing from an Ecological Perspective
The goal of this article is to advance an ecological theory of knowing, one that prioritizes engaged participation over knowledge acquisition. To this end, the authors begin by describing the environment in terms of affordance networks: functionally bound potentials extended in time that can be acted upon to realize particular goals. Although there may be socially agreed-upon trajectories specifying the necessary components of a network activated for realizing a particular goal, the particular network engaged by an individual is dependent on adopted intentions and available effectivity sets, the attunements and behaviors that an individual can enlist to realize an affordance network. Thus, to help clarify the challenges of connecting learners to ecological systems through which affordance networks are activated, the authors use the term life-world, which refers to the environment from the perspective of an individual. Building on their characterization of affordance networks, effectivity sets, and life-worlds, the authors offer an ecological focal point for curricular design. This article written with Michael Roth appeared in Educational Researcher.

Smart People or Smart Contexts? Cognition, Ability and Talent in an Age of Situated Approaches to Knowing and Learning
Intelligence, expertise, ability and talent, as these terms have traditionally been used in education and psychology, are socially agreed upon labels that minimize the dynamic, evolving, and contextual nature of individual-environment relations. These hypothesized constructs can instead be described as functional relations distributed across whole persons and particular contexts through which individuals appear knowledgeably skillful. The purpose of this article is to support a concept of ability and talent that is theoretically grounded in five distinct, yet interrelated, notions: ecological psychology, situated cognition, distributed cognition, activity theory, and legitimate peripheral participation. By arguing that ability is part of the individual-environment transaction, we take the potential to appear talented out of the hands (or heads) of the few and instead treat it as an opportunity that is available to all even though it may be actualized more frequently by some. This article appeared in Educational Psychologist.

Eat Your Vegetables and Do Your Homework: A Design-Based Investigation of Enjoyment and Meaning in Learning
Design-based research is a collection of innovative methodological approaches that involve the building of theoretically-inspired designs to systematically generate and test theory in naturalistic settings. Design-based research is especially powerful with respect to supporting and systematically examining innovation. In part, this is due to the fact that conducting design-based research involves more than examining what is. It also involves designing possibilities and then evolving theories within real-world contexts. In this article we share the historical development of three outcomes of our design-based work on the Quest Atlantis project, an interactive narrative designed for children ages 9-12 that includes a 3-D environment and various resources, with the goal of understanding the value of play spaces for learning. This article appeared in Educational Technology.

Constructing Virtual Worlds: Tracing the Historical Development of Learner Practices
In this manuscript we explore learning/instruction within a technology-rich, collaborative, participatory learning environment by tracking the emergence of shared understanding and products through an examination of student and teacher practices. Our interest was not simply in the interactions among students or between students and teachers, but included student-resource interactions with an emphasis on student-technology interactions. We present holistic accounts of two activity groups in the camp, emphasizing the focus of the activity, group dynamics including the role of the teacher, and the historical development of learner practices. We then use a network methodology to trace the history of interactions accounting for the emergence, evolution, and diffusion of learner practices. The findings suggest that becoming knowledgeably skillful with respect to a particular practice or concept is a multi-generational process, evolving in terms of contextual demands and available resources. The tracings further reveal the reciprocal nature of learning and doing. This article appeared in Cognition and Instruction.

Narratizing Disciplines and Disciplinizing Narratives
As a situativity theorist with a firm belief in the inextricable relations between content and context and between the knower and the known, I diverge from the dualist philosophy that began with Descartes and continues in current rhetoric, a philosophy that separates mind and body. And while not a narratologist, I embrace the power of story and regard the exclusion of narrative from disciplinary content as a threat to the very meaning of the disciplinary content that we hope schools to excite (Bruner, 2002). I regard learning as a participatory act that involves whole persons, not disembodied minds, and one that transcends content acquisition. In this manuscript, I argue for and outline what we refer to as reflexive play spaces, designed to facilitate situative embodiment. A reflexive play space (a) aims to support knowledgeable participation through engagement with (b) a dynamic narrative context (c) that changes in response to user actions and (d) that provides opportunities to examine one’s participation in relation to the impact of one’s choices on the narrative context. By design, reflexive play spaces are designed to facilitate four types of participation: knowledgeable participation, narrative participation, transactive participation, and reflexive participation. This chapter will appear in an edited volume on Games as 21st Century Curriculum.

Relating Narrative, Inquiry, and Inscriptions: Supporting Consequential Play
In this paper we describe our research using a multi-user virtual environment, Quest Atlantis , to embed fourth grade students in an aquatic habitat simulation. Specifically targeted towards engaging students in a rich inquiry investigation, we layered a socio-scientific narrative and an interactive rule set into a multi-user virtual environment gaming engine to establish a virtual world through which students learned about science inquiry, water quality concepts, and the challenges in balancing scientific and socio-economic factors. Overall, students were clearly engaged, participated in rich scientific discourse, submitted quality work, and learned science content. Further, through participation in this narrative, students developed a rich perceptual, conceptual, and ethical understanding of science. This study suggests that multi-user virtual worlds can be effectively leveraged to support academic content learning. This article is to appear in Journal of Science Education and Technology.

Developing an Empirical Account of a Community of Practice: Characterizing the Essential Tensions
This paper examines the potential of a learning-as-a-part-of-a-community approach, focusing on the participatory process of learning in a community-based, teacher education program, A Community of Teachers (CoT). CoT is a preparation program for pre-service teachers working toward secondary teacher certification in which they join an on-going community and remain a part of that community from two to four years. In this study, four participant-observers used field notes, document analysis, and interview data to build grounded interpretations of community life. In this reporting of the data we have framed these "experience-near" understandings in terms of core tensions (or illuminative dualities) and presented them in a manner that is likely to have "experience-distant" significance. This article appeared in the Journal of the Learning Sciences.

Design-Based Research: Putting a Stake in the Ground
Increasingly, learning scientists are finding themselves developing contexts, frameworks, tools and pedagogical models consistent with and to better understand emerging pedagogical theories or ontological commitments. In these contexts, the research moves beyond simply observing and actually involves systematically engineering these contexts in ways that allow us to improve and generate evidence-based claims about learning. In this introduction to the special issue on design-based research, Squire and I argue that if design-based research is to offer a useful methodological toolkit than we must ground our arguments and assertions in methodologies that are credible and trustworthy.This article appeared in the Journal of the Learning Sciences.

Critical Design Ethnography: Designing For Change
In this paper we describe an eighteen month collaboration between a university design-based, research group and an after-school organization for children. In this collaboration, we engaged in a process of transforming local context from one minimally focused on learning to one in which content learning and personal development were central. For us, what began as a needs analysis to underpin design work, became ethnographic with a focus on developing a collaborative change agenda. We became ethnographers and change agents, at some times supporting existing goals and at other times developing new ones. This account, as an illuminative case study, highlights issues of trust, power, ownership, and intentionality and how designers can opportunistically introduce a change agenda while maintaining a respectful stance so as not to alienate those with whom they are collaborating. This article appeared in the Anthropology & Education Quarterly.

Theoretical Assumptions and Methods for Researching Cognition Situated in Intentional Learning Environments
Situative and distributed theories of cognition increasingly are being proposed as alternatives to the traditional individualist notion offered by cognitive psychology. From this perspective, "knowledge," perhaps more aptly termed "knowing about," is no longer conceived of as a static structure residing in the individual's head; instead, knowing is a process distributed across the knower, the environment in which knowing occurs, and the activity in which the learner is participating. Thus knowing and context are irreducibly co-constituted, and learning is (re)conceived as fundamentally constitutive of the contextual particulars in which it is nested. How one begins to account for learning and the potential of a learning context to support learning is the focus of this special issue. This introduction brings together a selection of currently active researchers attempting to study cognition in situ (Roth, Cobb, Kirshner, Young, Kulikowich, Barab, Hay) to reflect upon the commonalties and differences in their approaches with respect to theoretical assumptions and methods. This article appeared as part of special issue I edited in the Journal of the Learning Sciences.

Games without Guns: Quest Atlantis, Making Learning Fun
This manuscript describes the Quest Atlantis (QA) project, a learning and teaching project that uses a multi-user, virtual environment to immerse children, ages 9-12, in educational tasks. QA combines strategies used in commercial gaming environments with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. It allows users at participating elementary schools and after-school centers to travel through virtual spaces to perform educational activities, talk with other users and mentors, and build virtual personae. Our work has involved an agenda and process that may be called socially-responsive design, which involves building sociotechnical structures that engage with and potentially transform individuals and their contexts of participation. This work sits at the intersection of education, entertainment, and social commitment and suggests an expansive focus for instructional designers. This manuscript appeared in Educational Technology, Research, and Development.

Designing System Dualities: Characterizing a Web-Supported Professional Development Community
In this article we focus on the challenges we have encountered in attempting to support the development of an online community of practice for grade 5-12 mathematics and science teachers. Specifically, this project involves the design and evaluation of an electronic knowledge network, the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), a web-based professional development system designed to support a community of practice (CoP) of in-service and preservice mathematics and science teachers who are creating, reflecting upon, sharing, and improving inquiry-based pedagogical practices. This research examines the interplay among a variety of variables that characterize the dynamics of building a social network through which participating teachers will seek to share and improve their pedagogical practices. Our research suggests that designing for virtual communities involves balancing and leveraging complex dualities from the inside rather than applying some set of design principles from the outside. This article appeared in Information Society.

Doing Science at the Elbows of Experts: Issues Related to the Science Apprenticeship Camp
The purpose of this manuscript was to synthesize literature related to apprenticeship learning, the sociology of science, and K-12 science education to develop a set of characteristics for designing/evaluating participatory science learning experiences. Following this discussion, we further clarify and illuminate the value of these characteristics for science educators by using them as evaluative criteria for characterizing the experiences of 24 middle school learners who embarked on a two-week long camp with "real" scientists engaged in "real" research. We also describe how middle school science teachers supported both reflection-in-practice and reflection-on-practice during the camp, and how an electronic notebook was also leveraged to support both types of reflection. Implications of these characteristics for science education more generally are discussed. This article appeared in the Journal of Research on Science Teaching.

Virtual Solar System Project: Developing Scientific Understanding Through Model Building
The goal of this manuscript is to describe the evolution of our introductory astronomy course for undergraduate students in which students use virtual reality to model the solar system and, in the process, develop rich understandings of astronomical phenomenon. The progression of our thinking and the course curriculum has been grounded in a series of "design experiments," in which we develop entire courses, do research, and cycle what we are learning into the next iteration of the course. In this manuscript, we reflect on these research findings, using case examples to situate the reader in the actual happenings of the course. Focusing primarily on the phases of the Moon and eclipses, we illustrate the modeling process and how learning evolved in this context. In general, we found that VR can be used effectively in regular undergraduate university courses as a tool through which students can develop rich understandings of various astronomical phenomena. This article appeared in the Journal for Research on Science and Technology.

An Introduction to the Special Issue: Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning
Currently, numerous educators and policymakers are advocating for a move away from teacher-centered models of instruction and toward more learner-centered and community-based models. However, at present the word community is at risk of losing its meaning. We have little appreciation and few criteria for distinguishing between a community of learners and a group of students learning collaboratively. This manuscript briefly overviews the goals of the special issue, highlighting what is known and the need for exploring the theoretical, design, learning, and methodological questions with respect to designing for and researching online communities to support learning. This introduction appears in Information Society.

From Practice Fields to Communities of Practice
The goal of this chapter is to explore the pedagogical implications of communities of practice, contrasting practices fields with the notion of communities of practice that have been advanced in anthropological circles. We propose characteristics of communities of practice that extend beyond those features typically found in psychologically based designs for learning. We also examine in greater detail, several examples of learning environments that purport to reflect the anthropological perspective on situativity, i.e., to focus on the development of self in the context of an individual's participation in a community. This chapter appears in D. Jonassen & S. Land (Eds.), Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments. LEA.

Constructivism in Practice: A Comparison and Contrast of Apprenticeship and Constructionist Learning Environments
This article compares and contrasts 2 summer camps. Future Camp 97 is based on assumptions consistent with constructionism and Scientists Apprentice Camp 97 consistent with legitimate peripheral participation. These 2 learning environments create an opportunity to do an empirical, as opposed to a strictly theoretical, comparison of what has been frequently lumped under the term constructivism. The goal of this article is twofold: First, to move the discourse away from comparing constructivist learning environments solely to traditional learning environments. The 2nd goal is to move away from talking of a single constructivist learning environment, and instead to explore the nuances of learning environments based on different theoretical assumptions. Toward these ends, we analyze 2 summer camps in terms of theoretical assumptions, community and groups, participant roles, practices, and other evidence of learning.Weconclude with a discussion of similarities and distinctions between these 2 learning environments, highlighting issues of ownership, authenticity, power, and task structure. This article by Ken Hay and myself appears in the Journal of the Learning Sciences.

Empowerment Design Work: Building Participant Structures that Transform
In this manuscript we describe our "empowerment design" work. Essentially, empowerment design is designing with heart. It is a complex work that involves bringing together multiple and even opposing agendas, acknowledging different voices, and even working through unintended consequences and confusing struggles that have no one clear answer. Here, we describe an empowerment design initiative that overtly attempts to transform a culture and empower those it serves by way of a technology-rich educational innovation called Quest Atlantis. While the project is currently situated in various informal and formal learning environments, much of the data in this account is focused on our collaboration with a local Boys and Girls Club that serves disadvantaged children. However, empowerment design requires going beyond the initial site of innovation, and therefore we also bring in data based on our work with teachers and additional sites so as to communicate the complete cycle of empowerment design. This article is to appear as part of the International Conference of the Leanring Sciences Proceedings.

Supporting Authenticity Through Participatory Learning
The purpose of this study was to share our experiences using emerging technologies to create an authentic learning context where pre-service teachers at a university and practicing K-12 teachers collaborate in the conduct of real-world tasks (as opposed to "textbook" exercises). In this paper, we demonstrate and evaluate the design of professional development that involved a partnership between two universities and eight surrounding K-12 schools. This partnership provides the foundation for supporting a learning community of pre-service and practicing teachers that situates both in collaborative practices that are authentic and valuable to all involved. An assumption underlying this research was that authenticity is an emergent process that is actualized through individuals' participation in tasks and practices of value to themselves and to a community of practice. The co-evolutionary model for supporting the emergence of authenticity described in this study provides a means of overcoming some of the challenges associated with simulation and participation models for establishing authentic learning experiences. This article appears in Educational Technology Research &: Development.

Designing System Dualities: Characterizing an Online Professional Development Community
In this manuscript we focus on the challenges we have encountered in attempting to support the development of an online community of practice for grade 5-12 mathematics and science teachers. Specifically, this project involves the design and evaluation of an electronic knowledge network, the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), a web-based professional development system designed to support a CoP of in-service and pre-service mathematics and science teachers who are creating, reflecting upon, sharing, and improving inquiry-based pedagogical practices (see http://ilf.crlt.indiana.edu). This chapter is to appear in S. A. Barab, R. Kling, R., & J. Gray (eds.), Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning.

Constructing Networks of Activity: An In-Situ Research Methodology
In this article we advance a methodology for capturing and tracing the emergence, evolution, and diffusion of a practice, concept, resource, or student-constructed artifact. The Constructing Networks of Action-Relevant Episodes (CN-ARE) methodology allows researchers to identify relevant data from a complex, evolving environment, and then to organize it into a web of meaning that can illuminate the historical development of the phenomenon of interest (e.g., conception of an eclipse, applications of a mathematical formula, an evolvoing student-constructed Website). The CN-ARE methodology is especially useful for researchers interested in carrying out design experiments in which research findings with respect to one iteration of a course are cycled into the design of future course instantiations. In addition to setting the context and providing a theoretical rationale for the CN-ARE methodology, this discussion includes an in-depth description of the methodology along with its application to data sets. This article appears in the Journal of the Learning Sciences.

Using Activity Theory to Understand the Contradictions Characterizing a Technology-Rich Introductory Astronomy Course
In this report of our research, we use the central tenets of Activity Theory to understand and illuminate how our course supports the emergence of activity systems that transform objects through which students, as subjects in these systems, develop deep and meaningful understandings. Specifically, we focus on the relations of subject (student) and object (3-D models and astronomy understandings) and how, in our course, object transformations leading to scientific understandings are mediated by tools (both technological and human), the overall classroom microculture (emergent norms), division of labor (group dynamics and student/instructor roles), and rules (informal, formal, and technical). Through analysis of the data we interpreted and then focused on two contradictions as illuminative of classroom activities. Our results indicated that it was rarely teacher-imposed nor student initiated constraints that directed learning; rather, rules, norms, and divisions of labor arose from the requirements of building and sharing 3-D models. This article is appeared in Mind, Culture, and Activity.

Designing Effective Interdisciplinary Anchors
In this article, we share experiences and insights with respect to the development and implementation of integrated units. The authors have participated in the movement towards interdisciplinarity in a number of capacities, including classroom teaching, in-service teacher education, curriculum development, and the application of electronic technologies to educational psychology research. The curricula described in this article have been developed by the authors, their students, and colleagues. A core argument of this articles is that one should conceive the central hub of an interdisciplinary unit as an anchor, with the potential to ecologize instruction. This article appeared in Educational Leadership. A related article appeared in the Middle School Journal.

Designing and Building an On-line Community: The Struggle to Support Sociability in the Inquiry Learning Forum
In this paper we describe the socio-technical structures of the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), a web- based professional development tool designed to support a community of in-service and pre-service mathematics and science teachers creating, sharing, and improving inquiry-based pedagogical practices. The hallmark of this environment is that teachers with a broad range of experience and expertise can come together in an online environment to observe, discuss, and reflect upon pedagogical theory and practice anchored to actual teaching vignettes. The goal of this paper is to share how we instantiated our pedagogical commitments and describe the challenges we faced during the design, development, implementation, and analysis of the ILF. Toward this end, we walk the reader through our design and implementation process, highlighting our change in focus from usability to sociability issues, and movement from conceiving the ILF as an electronic structure to a socio-technical interaction network. This is article appeared in Educational Technology Research and Development.

Principles of Self Organization: Learning as Participation in Autocatakinetic Systems
Modern science has been built on a Cartesian or Newtonian (mechanical) paradigm giving rise to an artifactual view of mind and suggesting that particles (the learner) are continuously working to destroy order (are recalcitrant), which is maintained (a didactic model) by an external arranger (the teacher). In contrast, in this article we make the argument for an alternative set of assumptions predicated on principles of systems and self-organization theories. In this article we argue that the ecologized, or self-organization model, assumes that (under the appropriate conditions) the learners, in effect, want to or are anxious to learn once the intention has been properly initialized. This article appeared in the Journal of the Learning Sciences.

Using Activity Theory to Conceptualize Online Community and Using Online Community to Conceptualize Activity Theory
In this paper we describe the evolving structure of the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), a socio-technical interaction network designed to support a web-based community of in-service and pre-service mathematics and science teachers sharing, improving, and creating inquiry based pedagogical practices. Specifically, we apply activity theory as an analytical lens for characterizing the process of designing and supporting the implementation of this online community. Our findings lend support for three implications. First, activity theory can provide a useful analytical tool for characterizing design activity, especially in terms of illuminating the challenges of designing something like community. Second, as one moves toward trying to design a community, particularly one in which the members will be expected to engage in new practices that challenge their current culture, many tensions emerge. Third, consideration of the ILF as a socio-technical interaction network was a necessary conceptual step in our understanding of the ILF and the transactional nature of people and tools. This article appeared in Mind, Culture, and Activity.

Online Learning: From Information Dissemination to Fostering Collaboration
In this article the trajectory of an online course in which graduate students collaboratively investigated and shared their personal experiences with respect to adult development is described. For this study, naturalistic inquiry was used to gain a holistic view of this semester-long course and to identify the specific emergent issues that characterized course dynamics. Using open, axial, and, to a lesser degree, selective coding, the following three issues were selected for further discussion: (a) flexibility of course to accommodate participants; (b) co-construction of meaning through the sharing of personal experiences; and (c) the expression of vulnerability and personal growth. This course provided evidence that on-line courses can support deep learning about content, open sharing about personal experiences, and the development of a sense of camaraderie among participants. This article appeared in the Journal of Interactive Learning Research.