Ricki Goldman-Segall is an Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is also the Director of MERLin (Multimedia Ethnographic Research Lab)
Introduction: The Gender and Science Debates
This paper reports on a two year ethnographic study focusing on gender, science education , and the introduction of networked digital media for learning in middle schools. My purpose is to shed light on various paths that may guide educators, researchers, and parents to think about the possibilities that lie within, around and outside the current boundaries of middle school science and social studies curriculum. I describe young people conducting a socio-scientific investigation of an endangered rain forest called Clayoquot Sound using emerging technologies as tools to (1)extend curricular boundaries and (2) challenge the notion of fixed gender and style preferences. Moreover, throughout this paper, I invite readers to view digital video clips of girls and boys talking about their experiences, adding comments at the web site where these video clips reside. I conclude by recommending that partnerships among young people, teachers, and researchers are formed to build knowledge cultures of inquiry for young people to pursue investigations according to their flexible gender attitudes.
Little research in the current literature on gender and science delves deeply into the thoughts of young people as they begin first to become acquainted with complex science issues and then to become familiar with the connections between existing scientific practices and their lives. Many feminist researchers and writers discuss the paucity of female role models and mentors for young women (Steinem, 1992), the exclusion of women's ways of knowing the world (Gilligan, 1982; Fox-Keller, 1985, 1992; Belenky et. al., 1986), the positive reinforcement that more aggressive young males receive in science classes (Sadker & Sadker, 1989; Stanworth, 1981 as cited in Spender, 1989; Gaskell et. al., 1992), and the fact that science is at best a positivist masculine construct that perpetuates the view of a world of male privilege (Manthorpe, 1982; Harding, 1991; Weiler, 1995). Walkerdine (1989) states that girls are "counted out" in mathematics and science by schooling methods that do not recognize the way they think about things - boys are encouraged to think in divergent ways whereas girls are not. Girls are encouraged to conform to the wishes of their teachers and others in power for approval. In addressing how to solve the hurdles young women encounter in the science classroom, various approaches have been proposed. On the one hand, some theorists say the curriculum should be gender neutral, and on the other hand, others argue that differences between the genders need to be acknowledged so that girls are not counted out. Challenging gender difference, biological determination, or epistemological pluralism (Turkle & Papert, 1990), Bryson and de Castell (1993) argue that a greater emphasis is needed on how gender differences are produced, "What is required is greater emphasis on the ways in which differences are produced through social relations and institutional practices, rather than on how to create, reify, and consolidate differences by liberalizing curricular options or increasing the number of legitimated "ways of knowing" from one to two (p. 65)."
Concurrently, as a result of a provocative gender experiment implemented by a grade three teacher who used her classroom as a setting to explore her own sexist practices, Sutherland (1996) concludes that, "to initiate effective change in gendered classroom practices, the children must be included in and empowered by the process of change; they must be able to both witness and understand the influence society has on them and have a voice in conceiving the form that change may take (p.66)."
The study I describe in this paper was designed to both change the social practices in which science knowledge is produced in the classroom and to examine constructivist epistemologies of young people while engaged in these activities. Steinem (1992) herself grew to understand more recently that one cannot change social structures without changing the self and the community around self and vice versa. The study involved mostly Grade 7 students from a semi-rural school setting as partners in the process of investigating the socio-scientific issues of an endangered rain forest. (Grade 6 students were involved in the end of each school year; grade 8 in the beginning of the following year.)
The topic was chosen to enable them to relate to this inquiry in a personal and social manner. Girls and boys were encouraged to find out more about the issues surrounding the conflict while teachers and researchers explored their own notions of what was needed to change the science curriculum to make it more invitational to both girls and boys. The study used emerging video technologies as tools to record formal and informal events. Extensive video interviews conducted by both principal researcher and participants added to the rich data base of the study.
My particular involvement throughout the study, as principal investigator, was twofold. I focused on girls' and boys' gendered conceptions about the traditional science curriculum in relation to this particular innovation. And, I reflected upon my own practice and a specifically-designed digital video data analysis tool, Constellations, I designed with my research team and then used in analyzing the data. In short, while I conducted the gender and science study, I also reflected upon and critiqued the tools, techniques, and artifacts of my own methodology, encouraging young people to think critically about my role of recording and describing their stories.
Premise: Learner as Ethnographer
This study is based on the central premise that the learner shares many common roles with the ethnographer. A learner becomes an expert on the culture of the content, decoding and recoding the meanings and making layering interpretations of events as experiences become richer. Encouraging learners to layer their knowledge and view events from various perspectives in much the same way as an ethnographer constructs the thick description, layer upon layer, (Geertz, 1973) is an important element in creating the convivial learning environment for a project-based study. As learners explore a subject they are interested in with tools to shape the representations of their experiences, they pay attention to how texts (print of visual) can be fragmented and put together in ways not conceived of by the original author. They might find out that, as readers, they construct texts as they read them (Bruner, 1986). Meanings become continually questioned as they learn how to shape and reshape their artifacts. Tying emerging media technologies into this kind of learning environment should provide the opportunity to engage students in both a more personal and a collaborative experience, if, indeed, the promise of emerging electronic media as cultural partners is realized. With electronic partners the nature of inquiry becomes personal, connected, and immediate (Papert, 1996). Learners reflect upon their own epistemological preferences, they can not only solve a problem but talk about that problem from their own points of viewing and others.
This premise of learner as ethnographer is one that, I believe, leads learners to ask whose knowledge, whose story, whose privilege is being represented as local and global events are studied. Learning in a constructionist digital environment becomes an integration of learner, media, texts (including the teacher), and content (or message as McLuhan [1962] would ask to consider) into one contiguous overlapping web. Educators, as partners in this community, help young people put together the bits and pieces of their experiences and the experiences of others (whose work the young people engage with in their texts) into meaningful wholes unique to them, layering descriptions of events as personal interpretations are juxtaposed to the interpretations previously constructed as well as to those which are being created by the community of inquiry. One of the obvious benefits of the Internet, for example, is that young people can now "see" that texts have authors and the "facts" presented in their school texts have hidden the constructionist nature of knowledge from them as they were taught the "basics" and "theories" with little opportunity to ask whose theories and for whose purposes.
When we decide to use media technologies as cultural partners in our learning, I believe, our abilities and our attitudes are extended, flexed, one might say. New technologies propose alternative ways for us to explore topics that are not bound by conventions designed for a pencil-and-paper classroom headed by a solitary teacher. With the help of media partners, learners can connect discrete chunks into groupings and design expressive artifacts that communicate their analyses and interpretations of their voyage to others. They can follow paths, navigate data, and put together textured layers of knowledge within their own learning constellations (Goldman-Segall, 1997). Learners can construct configurations that are unique to their points of viewing the world configurations that bring together the various knowledges they have gleaned from others. This includes the life lived in, around, and with texts, art forms, and reproductions created by people whom one may have only met virtually.
How was this premise that learners are like ethnographers using digital media built into the young people's study of Clayoquot Sound and my study of gender and science learning? Most importantly, learners became engaged in studying a subject that was relevant, concrete, and provocative. Studying Clayoquot (Klak-wit) Sound, one of North America's largest temperate rain forests with intact watersheds, as a community of inquiry provided an opportunity for students to build artifacts and theories about a complex socio-scientific study subject. As I will show, and much to my surprise, it also enabled young people to think beyond their gendered identities and try on new approaches, new thinking attitudes. Both girls and boys more fully utilized a relational, tangential, and storytelling style of thinking about and describing their making of representations. Learning became a situated, context-based interaction between the learner, her tools, and the environment as a whole (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Lave, 1991, 1993).
Student Population, Site, and Topic of Investigation
The study was conducted at a Vancouver Island school called Bayside Middle School over a two year period. A partnership among teachers, a vice-principal, the Distance Education Learning and Training Branch of the British Columbia Ministry of Education, and MERLin, our lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver was put in place and strengthened as the study progressed. Two different grade 7 school classes, one in 1993-1994 and the other in 1994-1995 built a range of paper and multimedia artifacts making extensive use of a variety of media forms. The girls and boys are fairly homogeneous in ethnic background by first appearances. Many young people are white Caucasian, but, of course, have quite a range of ethnic roots when one does not only focus on color of skin. A community of First Nations young people attend the school both as part of the regular school activities and in classes designed to maintain their cultural preferences and history. This state-of-the-art school was built in 1992. The staff and students had just moved into their new environment, which was equipped with computer labs and had computers in many of its classrooms. The school is modern in every respect: open spaces, sun roofs in hallways, and pods (groupings of classrooms) branching off from a central area, the entrance, where the auditorium, gymnasium, and administrative offices are located. The school looks and feels more like a community center with the hustle and bustle of kids in baggy pants and multi-colored hair. A school that holds many of the possibilities for healthy and educationally rewarding activities.
One of Bayside's 1993 innovations was to provide each teacher with a networked computer. By 1996, the teachers in each classroom had access to an Intranet and the Internet. For example, when I call the vice principal from my home in Vancouver and ask him which teachers might like to work with me on a collaborative study of an endangered rain forest, he dashes off an email message to his faculty asking them to get back to him. They do, within the day (or hour). Each pod, consisting of 10 classrooms, has its own Macintosh computer lab (the size of a regular classroom), with one computer for, at most, every two students. These labs are not project-based environments. In these rooms of wall-to-wall computers (color Mac Classics), the students learn how to use HyperCard, ClarisWorks, MS Word, and other software programs. In Joe Grewal's classroom, however, there is an adjoining workroom with several computers and video workstations with enough space for five or six people. Joe's students design their HyperCard projects in this space. Every person in the school has the right to an email account and has had access to the Internet and computer education since 1994.
Certainly, the learning environment was rich enough to study just the emergence of a computer culture. However, the challenge of making learning artifacts that emerged from a topic rich in diversity and controversy seemed like too great an opportunity to miss. What would they learn? How would they see their own learning? How would they describe their experiences? And, most importantly for me, what could I learn about their thinking about scientific investigations that would lead me to understand the role that gender plays. It is obvious to those who have worked with young people at the computer, that when they become engaged in studying a topic that is important to them, they don't only learn how to use a computer. They learn how to think about what they are researching from many perspectives. They connect ideas from various sources and build upon what they already know. The medium, the computer, becomes almost transparent, an extension of the thinking and making processes. Thus, we chose to investigate a topic rich in controversy.
Many of the young people's families are connected with the fishing, logging, and tourism industries or with government officials determining policy about Clayoquot Sound. Being on an island, albeit the size of Israel, connects people to local issues as a self-enclosed eco-system and social system. The topic, being local with global ramifications, has a high degree of relevancy and interest for the young people. Young adolescents tend to be quite concerned about plants and animals, and about the well-being of the planet in general. Indeed, in British Columbia the middle school science curriculum deals in detail with biodiversity, plant and animal life, and natural cyles. As a result, it was quite straight-forward for teachers to get involved in planning the integration of the Clayoquot theme into their teaching plans. Another reason for selecting this topic was that the Sound had also been the scene of extreme political dissent over clear-cut logging practices for over a decade now. During the summer of 1993, newspapers featured the issues surrounding forest practices at Clayoquot Sound daily. Protesters set up blockades on the logging routes, police jailed protesters, loggers continued to clear-cut, local townspeople in Tofino and Ucluelet worried about their livelihood, environmentalists claimed that bio-diversity was at risk, and government leaders considered their coffers while trying to establish a framework for forest practices. In short, the time seemed ripe for this topic, in this place, with this group of teachers and young people.
Methods: Digital Video Ethnography
The method of study to be described has two webbed and highly interactive parts, and therefore, I will weave my method as a research into the fabric of their activities. The first is the method (and the theorizing about the method, the methodology) which I used to study this community, and the second describes the intervention - what the young people did in their projects. However, as we know in ethnographic research, as in life in general, things are not so tidy. What a researcher does spills into the project, affecting situations that then change the researcher's activities. And, what young people do in their study influences how the researcher navigates through the data. In fact, roles change and students become researchers and epistemologists as they study their subject in this kind of learning environment. There were times when I was not quite sure exactly where we were going on our journey, but the wandering seemed to be the fundamentally important part of the project.
In essence, I became part of the culture of the school and used a variety of tools to support my inquiry. For the first part of the study I videotaped the school culture, everything from events in the gymnasium to lunch times in the auditorium. I also videotaped a wide range of their activities while they were conducting their own video-based investigations at Clayoquot Sound and around the school. I also "hung around" with the young people showing them how to shoot video and entering into conversations about their day-to-day lives in the school. On regular occasions, I conducted and videotaped one-on-one interviews with questions that were designed to elicit and provoke ideas about their own thinking. The questions were often responses to what they said, but sometimes I used a list of questions I would construct in advance to see how the various students would respond. Young people were given cameras so they could videotape their investigations. There were a few old video camcorders in the school that they could borrow from the library. I brought another one from MERLin for the Bayside classroom so that spontaneous events could be videotaped when they decided to do so.
I visited the school site approximately twice a month for two or three days a visit using video and textual notations written on my Powerbook; I kept these reflections available with my computer on and files open for teachers, young people, and parents to read. When the data was gathered (and while the data was being gathered), chunks of data were selected that best exemplified the approach used by the young people in designing their projects. This information was digitized and accessible to collaborative data analysis by myself and colleagues. At this stage, I looked for themes to gain a picture of the broader issues. Once these themes had been formed, I re-edited the video and built digital "vignettes" portraying the young people's thinking. My analysis of the video and text data occurred throughout the investigation. Categories were constantly being developed and shifted as opportunities became available and new experiences were being layered.
In MERLin, my team and I designed three multimedia tools. One tool, called "Constellations," is used to analyze digitized video and text data (Goldman-Segall, 1993). This research tool, based on a tool I designed at the MIT Media Lab called Learning Constellations, enabled me to access text, video, graphs, etc., and to browse through databases, collect and combine chunks into clusters, or constellations, and annotate. (This software can be downloaded from the MERLin site). The other tool is a CD-ROM computer program called The Global Forest designed for middle school students in distributed locations to learn from the Bayside young people's studies of Clayoquot Sound. And, the third is Web Constellations, the first server-side, web-based database system designed to enable a community to catalog, describe, and meaningfully organize data accessible on the Web. Learners or researchers in dispersed locations can use Web Constellations to access the same database and collaboratively analyze that set of data. Stars and constellations can be tagged with keywords and researchers can engage in dialog about particular stars and constellations using the annotation discussion system. Recently, a specifically designed version of Web Constellations has been linked to my book, Points of Viewing Children's Thinking: A Digital Ethnographer's Journey for readers to view the video described in the book and add their comments to other readers comments.
Planning meetings with teachers, the vice principal, and my colleagues from the University of Victoria took place in 1992 and 1993; implementation meetings were less formal and occurred throughout the project mainly over email and in and around the regular class schedule. My visits were usually made with a host of other researchers. My research assistant, spent most of his time working with the young people to solve technical problems. However, he also conducted interviews, spent time with the kids on field trips, and suggested many interpretations about how to think about young people's construction of their gender identity.
In their study, the young people investigated issues from as many perspectives as possible and with as many recorded media as available. They conducted school surveys and organized reports. They discussed the science behind concepts (like biodiversity) in class on a semi-regular basis as part of their science classes. Building portfolios about the issues using both primary and secondary sources, they browsed through the data they collected from the Ministry of Forestry, logging companies, environmental groups, WWW servers, and the usual resources in encyclopedias and school textbooks in the library. However, these young people had first-hand experiences from which to draw their understandings. We went on field trips to logging sites and the towns of Tofino and Ucluelet (situated in the heart of Clayoquot Sound). They slept in the only school in Tofino in sleeping bags on the school gym floor and got to meet the local kids playing a basketball game with them. They conducted on-location video interviews with locals and attended special lectures from scientists, environmentalists, and loggers working in Clayoquot Sound. Visitors to the school back in Brentwood Bay provided a range of up-to-date information. Throughout these events, the young people built multimedia representations using HyperStudio as they delved deeper into the web of discourse surrounding the dispute at Clayoquot Sound.
Most interesting to me was that, young people analyzed their video data from interviews and field trips. They were given copies of the videotapes to take home and watch on their VCRs. We asked them to select a few minutes that best conveyed the topic they were focusing on. For example, if they were concerned with animal life in the forest, they were asked to find data on that subject. However, that is not always what they did. The young people chose video that best reflected the highlights of the field trip for them! The scenes of them wading into the low rolling waves at Cox Bay seemed more interesting to them than a lecture on salmon fighting their way up a logged stream. What happened was that the curriculum would be high-jacked, from time to time, by the social events surrounding the project. Instead of forcing the kids back on track, however, the teachers decided to use their paths to make those paths "teachable moments."
Another favorite event they recorded was the scene they called the "Bear Scare." Jordan, their teacher, told them how bears like to live in the empty spaces that are caused by trees growing on nurse logs. Then he encouraged a few of the girls to go explore the mossy hole. As they entered and were having their picture taken, he ran around the tree and came into it from behind, growling like a bear. We all screamed in shock. An odd story to be the pinnacle of the year. But, there it is. Young people constructing their icons for describing events. Young people were also shown how to digitize and edit movies on a Power Mac. Four girls seemed to take this task most seriously. They logged all the data onto logging sheets they designed and named specific chunks. Newspaper clipping, photographs from the field trip, and maps were scanned into the computer. Journals were also entered as part of the database. Thus, the study was conducted as a collaborative community of inquiry. We didn't try to find solutions to the Clayoquot Sound dispute. Rather, we examined it and kept it as "an-object-to-think-with," as Papert would say. We turned it around in our hands and on our computer screens, looking for ways to make sense of our experiences with this "object." What we found was that it was our relationship with it, how we turned an object into a subject of interest for us all, that kept our interest levels high. As Terri-Lynn said, at no point did the study become boring for them or for me.
Online Digital Video Case Studies
Throughout this paper, I have presented an argument that both girls and boys used this media-rich project-based learning environment for genderflexing crossing boundaries that were previously marked by our culture as being gender specific. My thesis is that young people, when genderflexing, reach beyond the gender stereotypes that once selected or excluded them from certain forms of inquiry. What lead me to this conclusion? Instead of describing the case studies to readers in text form, I have decided to share the video data that now reside on a website. However, let me introduce a few of the young people from the case studies and invite readers to enter into a community of interpretions. Then, in closing this paper, I will explain how I have reached a theory of genderflexing and why I believe the use of various video-based media support an interdisciplinary approach to learning within the middle school curriculum when integrating science, social studies, and the visual arts.
Mia, a social activist, did not think she was good at science. In fact, she tells me that she "sometimes doesn't understand it." Yet, she has just finished an 40 page report on the issues surrounding forest life. I asked her if she understood it with Clayoquot. She answered, "Yeah, yeah, I understood the science of Clayoquot! And so maybe something in ecology or something. I haven't decided yet. " I asked her,"So that idea has opened up to you as a possibility? She enthusiastically responded, "Yeah, yeah, I think so, because the more knowledge you have about something, the easier it will be to get interested or get into that kind of thing. So, I haven't really thought about [being a scientist], but maybe now I will. (p. 205)
Justin has a similar problem in understanding his own study, "Like, for science I always thought it was kind of like being a chemist and putting some things together and like making different things. But it has to do with nature, big time." (p. 241)
Perhaps my biggest surprise was that the Bayside Middle School boys repeatedly told me how they needed a "hands-on" (or "eyes-together," as Ryan might say), connection to science, just as often as the girls did. These are the in-between years, when boys still talk sensitively in front of adults and their peers. They are willing to engage and immerse themselves. Ross, in a moment of deep emotion tells me and his two classroom buddies, "I think that science, what it does is, teaches you about things. Like, say there's one main person and say they taught me about Sean and I got to know Sean and I'd be his friend and I'd respect him. But if I didn't know him, I might not say "hi" and notice him that much, and respect him. That's the kind of thing with science, it gets all the things that teaches you to be a friend; and friends you respect. (p. 225)
This interview among others turned my head around. I had once thought only girls spoke so relationally about their relationship to what they studied. This interview forced me to look over my video data and question the neat bi-polarity of the genders. Maybe, things are not divided. Maybe gender is a continuum as writers have suggested no clear masculine and feminine dichotomy but rather a range of ways in which we are gendered by choice or by societal coersion. If so, how could I look for patterns in the data that would help explain adolescent thinking in media environments. I revisited the notion of thinking styles. Papert, who had spent time working with Piaget, suggested that stages be rethought using a word that was much used in the late eighties and early nineties-styles. The articles by Turkle and Papert (1991) and my own work (Goldman-Segall, 1991) proposed a theory of epistemological pluralism. Where Turkle and Papert proposed a "hard" vs "soft" thinker model, with an emphasis on the soft as a legitimate way to practice and theorize about science, my work described three children with three styles, not as the only three but as three that I could identifiy: causal/empirical; social/relational; and, narrative. In revisiting these categories in this study, I had to conclude that I could not place Ross, Sean, and Brian in the causal. Nor could I place them as hard thinkers. What I realized was that styles is too strong a word for adolescent thinking. Adolescent thinking is not fixed but moving, flexing, and changing. The adolescents in this study were tried on various roles. Not that they changed from day-to-day. But they were willing to engage in various forms of discourse. The words that match the findings or constructions in this study are thinking attitudes.
I define attitudes, not as psychologists have used the word in any number of studies that start with the phrase "children's attitudes toward," but as indicator of a fluid state of mind, a ballet pose in which the dancer, standing on one leg, places the other behind it, resting on the calf. Attitude, as a pose, leads into the next movement. Thus attitude is a more flexible notion than style, as it brings together both the positionality and the orientation of the dancer. Ross and his friends move from the outside to the intimate. Ross walks out into the waves, lost in the experience, and returns to the shore slightly changed. He says, "Ricki, it's changed me."
Discussion
Ethnography does not often lead to tidy results but rather to doors that are left open by the ethnographer, spaces to walk through, and descriptions that tend to suggest rather than recommend. I have chosen to write up this study quite linearly and without the poetry of the experience for a few reasons. The first is that the purpose of this article is as much to report upon the research as to experiment with the form of writing with access to the video excerpts and tools for annotation. Because this text has links, I have chosen to present the paper in a less dense and more grazing style with clear markers the signposts of empirical studies, theory, population, site, intervention, method, discussion, results, and conclusion. The second reason for this choice is that the book I have recently written contains the detailed descriptions and the framework for digital ethnographic study in general. For this article, my purpose, as stated previously was to textually and visually describe how learners become active participants when studying socio-scientific issues and using media. Have I done this? Let me close this discussion with Nicole's reflection on her experience, "We'd come up to someone who just looked like they had an opinion on something and we'd say, 'We're doing a project for Bayside Middle School and can we ask you a few questions?' And they'd ask what for, and we'd say, 'about Clayoquot Sound. And if you don't know the answers or anything, we'll be editing it, so it's not like you'll have all the bloopers or whatever.'" (p. 211)
Nicole, through this project, becomes aware of the balance of power between filmmaker and those being filmed. She announces that she will not embarrass anyone by making them seem ignorant or foolish. In her seemingly naive comment, "and if you don't know the answers or anything, we'll be editing it," Nicole acknowledges her sensitivity to the process of both videotaping and editing documentary media. Technically, she speaks with ease about how to get analog signals onto the computer by digitizing them and adding titles and fade-aways. Theoretically, she addresses issues such as trust and truth in reporting. However, she not only is concerned with how the video stories will be presented; she also addresses the complexity of distinguishing between "opinions" and "facts." This is a critical issue in making media, especially in these times when our media culture is in transition. The digital world is not only about signals; it heralds an era of consciousness about our psychological parts, which can be reconstituted into new wholes, and a space where the boundaries between opinions and facts, or between advertising and content, may be blurred. These kids, Nicole in particular, got to understand that.
Conclusions
1. Richer Digital Media Fluency
Several girls and a few boys in this study did realize that what they were doing was a scientific endeavor. In the second year of the project (1994-1995), however, the young people used more video, digitized data, and used the WWW. They also visited Clayoquot Sound on an intensive four day field trip. Although this study does not prove that the non-traditional science students are becoming more competent in their perceptions of themselves as young scientists, I am able to indicate that young people, especially girls and some boys, spoke about themselves and about their activities in ways which show that they became more fluent in the use of the media and about the role of media when thinking about complex socio-scientific issues. In the beginning of the project, one young person, when asked "Where is Clayoquot Sound?" answered that Clayoquot Sound was a clacking sound that was "in the air"! By the end of the project, they could converse, write about, and build representations that showed their deep understanding of the issues. Many had changed their opinions and became a bit more flexible in their understanding of the various perspectives, the various points of viewing. By concretizing their experiences around an intellectual theme connected to their lives, young people began to add levels of understanding about fundamental social and scientific principles, as Perkins suggested in 1986. Their comments reflected a moving from pre-judgment to informed opinion that grew (1) with experience of primary and secondary sources, (2) with an opportunity to balance differing points of view, and (3) with the use of diverse expressive modes of representing what is learned.
2. Gender is a Flexible Constuct
Bayside girls and boys spoke differently about their thinking after our collaborative investigation took place; they spoke with authority, sincerity, depth, and maturity. Being partners with teachers and university faculty in a project where they had opportunities to study science as ethnographers might study a culture by becoming participant observers of a socio-scientific issue heightened their level of connection. As Tobias (1994) points out, "working on interesting, compared to neutral, materials may engage deeper cognitive processing, around a wider, more emotional, and more personal associative network, and employ more imagery" (p. 37).
3. Science and Society More Closely Linked in Media-Rich Learning Cultures
The use of advanced technologies seems to aid people's studying the world as a member of that world. It builds an alternative paradigm for doing science one that is personal and collaborative simultaneously, multidisciplinary, and respectful of diverse ways of making meaning from what is observed and understood. This shift may provide girls and boys with opportunities not only to adapt to changes in science and technology but to be the inventors of that cultural change in the making of science by sharing perspectives, a new way of looking at what we thought we knew emerges. As Hammersley and Atkinson so aptly put it, they become "part of the world [they] study" (1983). When a topic is relevant to the lives of young people, then it stands to reason that they will be more willing to engage in the investigation. What makes the study of science meaningful and interesting is when scientific problems are embedded in a relevant topic that they can examine as a web of complex ideas. In short, they see the topic as being integrally tied in with their own understanding of the world and its complexity.
Implications for the Science Curriculum
Should the curriculum change? How can making connections and seeing relationships among seemingly diverse points of view be appreciated as a valid form of scientific inquiry in schools that is distinct from measurement and breaking things apart to understand causal links? How can young people study topics that deeply and personally relate to them so that they can put together themes from emergent groupings of data? Should we stop emphasizing repeatability and generalizability, and devise theories that are grounded in the manner a large number of living things on this planet carry out their activities instead? Obviously, I would say yes. The barrier is not just the will to address these concerns but it is the ability to understand what prevents us from doing this. As we know from those young people who are active in home schooling, a critical aspect of following through on a large project is being able to have the time to work for long periods on one topic. Until we address this "scheduling" problem we are caught in the circle of small tasks that cannot produce in-depth studies.
Science education needs to include a network of human relationships focusing around topics that involves young girls and boys, topics that are broad enough to contain many points of viewing issues so that individual and group concerns can overlap and interrelate. It seems reasonable to pose as Rosser (1990) has suggested that as more young people become engaged in studying science, the way science is currently studied in schools and in our research centers will also change. Moreover, as Harding (1991) suggests, the nature of doing and defining science will change only when we address the questions "whose science?" and "whose knowledge?" Once we have addressed this feminist question about the nature of knowledge, then perhaps we can move to what Harraway (1991) calls "an earth-wide network of connections, "including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different" and power-differentiated "communities... in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for the future" (p. 187).
Adventures in genderflexing by young people while constructing social and scientific knowledges can lead to a fundamental change in how disciplinary fields are constructed in the future carefully, inclusively, and with awareness of both the thinking young people bring to the science discourse and the social structures within which these practices occur.
Acknowledgments: The digital video ethnographic software development was conducted in MERLin, the Multimedia Ethnographic Research Lab at the University of British Columbia, supported by grants from Oracle Corporation, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The author also wishes to thank the Bayside Middle School and the Distance Learning and Training Branch of the BC Ministry of Education for their support. Thanks to head programmer and design partner in MERLin, Lawrence Halff, and to the students, their parents, and teachers at the Bayside Middle School who encouaged me to make this work public. I believe their trust in my story about their lives is well placed. Nevertheless, I thank them for their courage for making their voices heard by readers.
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