#WaveWatching as “transformative experience”? (Based on articles by Pugh et al. 2019, 2011, 2010)

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I was reading an article on “active learning” by Lombardi et al. (2021), when the sentence “In undergraduate geoscience, Pugh et al. (2019) found that students who made observations of the world and recognized how they might be explained by concepts from their classes were more likely to stay in their major than those who do not report this experience” jumped at me. Something about observing the world and connecting it to ideas from class was so intriguing, that I had to go down that rabbit hole and see where this statement was coming from, and if it might help me as a theoretical framework for thinking about #WaveWatching (which I’ve been thinking about a lot since the recent teaching conversation).

Going into that Pugh et al. (2019) article, I learned about a concept called “transformative experience”, which I followed back to Pugh (2011): A transformative experience happens when students see the world with new eyes, because they start connecting concepts from class with their real everyday lives. There is quote at the beginning of that article which reminds me very much of what people say about wave watching (except that in the quote the person talks about clouds): that once they’ve started seeing pattern because they understood that what they look at isn’t chaotic but can be explained, they cannot go back to just looking at the beauty of it without questioning why it came to be that way. They now feel the urge to make sense of the pattern they see, everytime they come across anything related to the topic.

This is described as the three characteristics of transformative experiences:

they are done voluntarily out of intrinsic motivation (meaning that the application of class concepts is not required by the teacher or some other authority),
they expand peception (when the world is now seen through the subject’s lens and looks different than before), and
they have experiential value (meaning the person experiencing them perceives them as adding value to their lives).

And it turns out that facilitating such transformative experiences might well be what distinguishes schools with higher student retention from those with lower student retention in Pugh et al.’s 2019 study!

But how can we, as teachers, facilitate transformative experiences? Going another article further down the rabbit hole to Pugh et al. (2010), this is how!

The “Teaching for Transformative Experiences” model consists of three methods acting together:

framing content in a way that the “experiential value” becomes clear, meaning making an effort to explain the value that perceiving the world in such a way adds to our lives. This can be done by expressing the feelings it evokes or usefulness that it adds. For #WaveWatching, I talk about how much I enjoy the process, but also how making sense of an aspect of the world that first seemed chaotic is both satisfying and calming to me. But framing in terms of the value of the experience can also be done by metaphors, for example about the tales that rocks, trees, or coastlines could tell. Similarly, when I speak about “kitchen oceanography”, I hope that it raises curiosity about how we can learn about the ocean in a kitchen.
scaffolding how students look at the world by helping them change lenses step by step, i.e. “re-seeing”, for example by pointing out specific features, observing them together, talking through observations or providing opportunities to share and discuss observations (so pretty much my #WaveWatching process!).
modeling transformative experiences, i.e. sharing what and how we perceive our own transformative experiences, in order to show students that it’s both acceptable and desirable to see the world in a certain way, and communicate about it. I do this both in person as well as whenever I post about #WaveWatching online.

So it seems that I have been creating transformative experiences with #WaveWatching all this time without knowing it! Or at least that this framework works really well to describe the main features of #WaveWatching.

Obviously I have only just scratched the literature on transforming experiences, but I have a whole bunch of articles open on my desktop already, about case studies of facilitating transformative experiences in teaching. And I cannot wait to dig in and find out what I can learn from that research and apply it to improve #WaveWatching! :)

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Lombardi, D., Shipley, T. F., & Astronomy Team, Biology Team, Chemistry Team, Engineering Team, Geography Team, Geoscience Team, and Physics Team. (2021). The curious construct of active learning. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 22(1), 8-43.

Pugh, K. J., Phillips, M. M., Sexton, J. M., Bergstrom, C. M., & Riggs, E. M. (2019). A quantitative investigation of geoscience departmental factors associated with the recruitment and retention of female students. Journal of Geoscience Education, 67(3), 266-284.

Pugh, K. J. (2011). Transformative experience: An integrative construct in the spirit of Deweyan pragmatism. Educational Psychologist, 46(2), 107-121.

Pugh, K. J., Linnenbrink-Garcia, L., Koskey, K. L., Stewart, V. C., & Manzey, C. (2010). Teaching for transformative experiences and conceptual change: A case study and evaluation of a high school biology teacher’s experience. Cognition and Instruction, 28(3), 273-316.

Follow-up on the iEarth teaching conversation: Why cognitive apprenticeship?

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One question came up after I had written up my one-pager on the iEarth “teaching conversation”: Why “cognitive apprenticeship”?

Over the years, I made a couple of observations across several universities in three countries:

Students learn a lot of factual, conceptual and formalized procedural knowledge, working mainly on textbook data and problems. They often have difficulties transferring knowledge and skills to messy authentic tasks, and they are not given many opportunities to practice applying them to real-world contexts (at least not before their Bachelor/Master projects).
There are not many opportunities for students to engage with teachers informally, meaning that there is a perceived artificial distance that creates a threshold for engagement, and students have little access to potential role models.
Relationships between students and teachers are often confined to the duration of a course, therefore short-lived (unless students work for that specific teacher or write a thesis with them).
Teachers often don’t share their thought processes explicitly for students to learn from, and similarly in a science communication setting, scientists don’t often make their thought processes transparent to their audience.
For many people, the threshold to engage in sensemaking of the physics of a system, both by themselves and in conversation with others, seems very high.
With courses being almost exclusively online since March 2020 where I am at, studying has become a lonely practice and it is difficult to build an identity if communities and role models are not easily available.

Personally, I enjoy deep exchange about what other people observe and how they interpret it, and my own observations and interpretations, leading to the shared construction of a common understanding. When I first started #WaveWatching, I was in a job in a non-oceanography context, and was missing such conversations on ocean topics. Due to the nature of my job, I could not as easily access them in the usual ways (office mates, coffee breaks, seminars, conferences) and thus had to create my own space and community. Now, I want to extend the invitation to join me in this, both to students and in a science outreach context, to share my fascination with water and the fun of a shared sensemaking process.

I retrospectively described the model I chose for #WaveWatching as “cognitive apprenticeship” as defined by Collins et al., 1988, which I summarize here and refer to my points above (in brackets): Cognitive apprenticeship places a strong focus on strategic knowledge, e.g. expert problem-solving and learning strategies (1.). This focus becomes evident in the attempt to give students “the opportunity to observe, engage in, and invent or discover expert strategies in context” (1., 2.), situated in the real world (1.), by using six teaching methods: modelling (4.), coaching (5.), scaffolding (5.), articulating, reflecting, exploring. These methods are used in sequences going towards more complex, more diverse, and from global towards more local skills, with students owning the problems they work on and choosing an appropriate level of difficulty (5.). All of this is embedded in the social context of “a learning environment in which the participants actively communicate about, and engage in, the skills involved in expertise, where expertise is understood as the practice of solving problems and carrying out tasks in a domain.”

The community of practice around #WaveWatching extends far beyond individual classes I teach. Many of it happens online on social media, welcoming everybody to engage with it (2., 3., 6.). Even though I was initially strongly involved in using, and thus gathering a community around, the hashtag, there are now many people engaged in the domain of the physics of surface waves, engaging in the shared practice of trying to understand what is going on, both in situ and on pictures shared within the community: A community of practice has formed. Due to its virtual nature, the threshold for engagement is as low as snapping a picture and pasting it with the hashtag, and people in the community will start discussing about what can and cannot be deduced from the photo.

What I did not consider witing all of this is that the term “apprenticeship” might evoke images of strong hierarchies, of “the master being The Master”, even though I totally see it now, after it has been pointed out to me. To me, what the term brings to mind is a community of learners, that have a common interest (waves) engage in a shared practice (wave watching). In that way, the apprenticeship model is about “the master” (or teacher) making sure that new members are welcomed in the community and connected to everybody that can help them thrive, about creating a community of practice than about the apprenticeship model itself. Which is, coincidally, where the idea of a “community of practice” originated (Wenger, 2011).

Super interesting to ponder these questions and the implicit assumptions that come with using terminology and that can really confuse us if we don’t manage to catch them and make them explicit!

#WaveWatching: Wind & sheltering

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For my dear friends, who are worrying because I didn’t post any #WaveWatching pics recently: I’m still here, and I’m still wave watching! :)

For example on my lunch time walk with F today: Isn’t this a beautiful pic of how waves build up over both time and distance if the wind is blowing continuously? In the far back, there are hardly any waves because the water is sheltered from the wind, and the water looks dark, because it’s reflecting the trees in the back. As we move away from the trees and onto the open lake, waves grow. We now see the sky reflected in the rougher parts, but in other parts we still see flat areas where there are smaller waves and we notice the reflection of the sky.

The closer we move to the foreground, i.e. downwind, the larger the waves become. Until there are pieces of wood floating in the water that suddenly shelter a small area! Notice how suddenly there are only “longer” waves moving into that area, but all smaller wavelengths disappear, because the wind forcing is gone?

An iEarth teaching conversation with Kjersti Daae and Torgny Roxå on #WaveWatching

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iEarth is currently establishing the new-to-me format of “teaching conversations”, where two or more people meet to discuss specific aspects of one person’s teaching in a “critical friend” setting. Obviously I volunteered to be grilled, and despite me trying to suggest other topics, too (like the active lunch break and the “nerd topic” intro in a workshop), we ended up talking about … #WaveWatching. Not that I’m complaining ;-)

After the conversation, I wrote up the main points as a one-pager, which I am sharing below. Thank you, Kjersti and Torgny, for an inspiring conversation!

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I use #WaveWatching in introductory courses in oceanography and in science outreach both on social media and in in-person guided tours. #WaveWatching is the practice of looking at water and trying to make sense of why its surface came to look the way it does: What caused the waves (e.g. wind, ships, animals)? How did the coastline influence the waves (e.g. shelter it from wind in some places, or block entrance into a basin from certain directions, or cause reflection)? What processes must be involved that we cannot directly observe (e.g. interactions with a very shallow area or a current)? Kjersti Daae (pers. comm.) suggests an analogy to explain #WaveWatching: Many people enjoy a stir-fry for its taste, like we enjoy looking at water, glittering in the sun, without questioning what makes it special. But once we start focusing on noticing different ingredients and the ways they are prepared, it is a small change in perspective that changes our perception substantially, and leads to a new appreciation and deeper understanding of all future stir-fries (and possibly other dishes) we will encounter.

I teach #WaveWatching using a cognitive apprenticeship leaning (Collins et al., 1988) approach*: By drawing on photos of selected wave fields (in the field using a drawing app on a tablet), I model my own sensemaking (Odden & Russ, 2019). I coach students to engage in the process, and slowly fade myself out. Students then engage in #WaveWatching practice anywhere they find water – in the sink, a puddle in the street, a lake, the ocean. Since waves are universally accessible, this works perfectly as hyper-local “excursions” in virtual teaching: Students work “in the field” right outside their homes.

Waves are not an integral part of the general curriculum in physical oceanography. While some wave processes are relevant for specific research questions, for typical large-scale oceanography they are not. And the concepts used in #WaveWatching are not even new to students, they are just an application of high-school optics to a new context.

Nevertheless, #WaveWatching helps work towards several goals that are important to me:

Using “authentic data” acts as motivation to engage with theory because the connection with the real world makes it feel more interesting and engaging (Kjelvik & Schultheis, 2019).
Engaging in sensemaking and gaining experience on what can (and cannot!) be concluded from an observation are highly relevant skills and this is an opportunity for practice.
Building an identity as oceanographer – seeing the world through a new lens, joining a community of practice (Wenger, 2011), but also being able to demonstrate newfound expertise and identity to friends and family outside of that new community by talking about this new lens – are otherwise rare in socially distant times.

After being exposed to #WaveWatching, people tell me that they can’t look at water in the same way they did before. They are now seeing pattern they never noticed, and they try to explain them or ask themselves what I would see. They often send me photos of their observation years after our last interaction, and ask if I agree with their interpretations. #WaveWatching might thus be a threshold concept, “a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something” and where “the change of perspective […] is unlikely to be forgotten” (Meyer & Land, 2003).

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Literature:

Collins, A., Brown, J. S., & Newman, S. E. (1988). Cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching the craft of reading, writing and mathematics. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 8(1), 2-10.
Kjelvik, M. K., & Schultheis, E. H. (2019). Getting messy with authentic data: Exploring the potential of using data from scientific research to support student data literacy. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 18(2), es2.
Meyer, J. H. F., and Land, R. (2003) “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising” in Improving Student Learning: Ten Years On. C. Rust (Ed), OCSLD, Oxford.
Odden, T. O. B., & Russ, R. S. (2019). Defining sensemaking: Bringing clarity to a fragmented theoretical construct. Science Education, 103(1), 187-205.
Wenger, E. (2011). Communities of practice: A brief introduction.

*more on that in this post (that comes online on 21.5.2021).

Using an active lunch break to see the world through our subject area’s lens and to reconnect us to what fascinates and motivates us

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I often teach faculty development workshops at Kiel University. Since we have been in remote teaching mode almost exclusively since March 2020, dealing with virtual classes is a pressing subject – both for the faculty who attend my workshops, but also for myself as I have to present best practice examples of leading fully-virtual all-day workshops.

I got the idea I will present here from David Morgan (this is his implementation) during the September 2020 “FieldWorkFix during Covid-19” conference, where I experienced the “active lunch break” as a participant. I remember being slightly annoyed that people were trying to hijack my lunch break (which already started out an hour late due to the time difference!), and that I did not completely follow the instructions. David asked us to follow a quasi-random, “bias-free” path determined by “wandering cards” (e.g. “follow something yellow”, “take a right turn”, “sit down for 2 minutes and see what happens”) in order to get us off our well-trodden paths to make it easier to see the world with different eyes and also to lower the threshold of picking something that we feel needs to count as a good example with a clear connection to our subject. So no pressure to go running to the botanical gardens for the biologists, or the beach for the oceanographers! I thought “it’s my lunch break after all, so I will do what I please!” and went the straight down to Kiel fjord, as I do every day. I then took a photo as instructed, “using my subject area as my lens”, and uploaded it to the website. I started the second half of the day with newfound energy and inspiration, glad that I had gotten over my internal resistance and participated.

I have since used a similar active lunch break in three full-day faculty development workshops with approximately 15 participants each. Every time, right before the 1-hour lunch break, I introduce the task. I ask them to take the opportunity to step away from their screens for a bit instead of catching up on email, to get some movement, some natural light, some oxygen. I state that I know that it’s a bit of a leap of faith to spend their lunch break “my way”, but that I would really encourage them to at least step out on their balcony and find *something* that they notice as an expert in their fields, to take a picture and to upload it in a shared google slides document. I share examples of what we did during that initial workshop and of what participants in previous workshops did. I then start the lunch break and anxiously run outside to at least do the task myself, even if everybody else might choose not to. I tell myself that if nobody actually ended up doing the task, it would be a great opportunity to talk about why students might choose to not do the tasks they are given.

As I am walking, I always find something that fascinates me and that I can relate to my interest in oceanography. I take a picture, also take in the nature around me, and relax. I come back and upload the picture, adding a short description of what what the picture shows looks like through my eyes. Then, slowly, the participants return and usually more than 4 out of 5 upload a picture.

When everybody is back and the break is over, I ask them about how it went for them. Each time, someone mentions that they would not have taken the time to take a real break and go outside, had I not encouraged it and connected it to a task that they felt obliged to work on. Then, someone says how they at first thought that it would be impossible to find something to take a picture of, because their research field is so specialized and abstract, and how they were then excited to see something and feel like they were noticing a connection to their field that would be invisible to others, and how that reminded them of how very cool they thought their field was. And someone says how they want to use it on their own students if they have to teach full days and really want to make sure they include a real break.

The kind of pictures that people bring back are very different. For me as an oceanographer as well as for other people in geosciences, it is very easy to relate puddles on the street to the ocean, or children’s windmills to measurements of atmospheric properties. A professor in chemistry took a picture of a climbing rope web on a playground and related it to the crystal structures he is studying. Linguists bring pictures of election posters or advertisements with slogans on them, of flowers that remind them of medieval poetry, of a flower behind a fence that elicits the idea how reading can free the mind. An ecologist showed a picture of a bird’s nest in her conservatory as an example of contextuality of reproduction decisions: Starting to build the nest there seemed a good decision at the time, but then the weather changed and what used to be a secluded and quiet place became a high traffic area for children. Looking through those pictures with the participants is a joyful excursion into the way other people perceive the world, full of wonder and a sense of exploration and excitement.

I really like this “active lunch break” task because of the effect it has on my participants, and on me! So much so that I use this method “just on myself” on long working days, and I have never regretted doing it :)

Have you ever tried something similar? Would you?

The “lightning storm in the chat” method

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In a workshop I led recently, a participant helped me gain a new perspective on an old method: the “lightning storm in the chat” (my best attempt at translating “Chatgewitter” to English. No idea what the name of the method is in English).

The idea is simple: You ask a question, people type their responses in the chat, but they don’t send them just yet. After either a fixed time or a short countdown, everybody presses enter simultaneously, and all the answers appear in the feed at the same time.

I’ve always seen this used as ice breaker question (“what kind of drink do you have on your desk right now?”, “what’s your favourite pet?”, or similar “ice-breaking” questions) and I always thought it was a typical example of a method that was just being used because we always learn that we should occasionally change methods, but that didn’t actually do much except waste time (which, btw, is a common perception of multiple choice questions, too, which I always counter with “well, maybe you need to ask better questions”…).

But obviously, the same “lightning storm in the chat” method can be used with better — open, deeper, more interesting — questions, too, and then goes from being a silly waste of time to a useful tool:

Since everybody types at the same time, this method is a lot faster than the typical methods of collecting input, where one person responds, and then the next one responds, and so on. Now we just need to give a minute or two (or five) to think and type, and then all the answers are ready to be submitted.
Since we are collecting all the different answers within a matter of minutes, it is actually feasible to get an answer from everybody in the audience. This would most likely not be possible if we were relying on people to verbally communicate their answers.
Since a lot of answers appear at the same time, it takes pressure and importance off of each individual response. Each response still contributes to the overall picture, but in the end, it is just one of many. This makes the threshold a lot lower than if people were responding one at a time.
When participants respond one after the other, responses are inevitably biased by what was said before. Not with this method: we get a good impression of what people are thinking individually, pre-discussion. (This can be helpful for assigning people into groups for discussion later on, too!)
In contrast to multiple-choice questions with pre-defined answers, we are also not missing out on nuances in the responses when someone mostly agrees with an answer, but not quiiite, but has no way of indicating that in a classical multiple-choice choice (well, we are still missing nuances here, too, since we are still typing under time pressure, but you get my point)
Also in contrast to multiple-choice questions, there is hardly any preparation going into it. Questions can be asked spontaneously when the need arises. (Obviously, for the purpose of optimally supporting learning it still makes sense to think about questions a little, and not just rely on spontaneous intuition as a default…)
Since there are no pre-defined answer options, this is a great tool to ask e.g. for suggestions on how to proceed, what kind of topic would be interesting to discuss, or other really open questions that can help the instructor understand what the participants want or need at that time.

Have you used the “Chatgewitter” method before? What do or don’t you like about it?

A quick intro to #WaveWatching

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I set up a german page with a very simple intro to wave watching and thought I’d repost the images below.

The reason for that new page is super exciting: Another article about me & wave watching will come out in print soon, and they will refer to a german version of my wave watching fortune teller, for which I wanted to provide a downloadable pdf. So since that pdf needed to be hosted somewhere and I felt that it deserved a bit more of an explanation, I might have gone slightly overboard. Anyway. There is no such thing as too much wave watching, right?

Did you like this as a super easy introduction to wave watching? What could I do to make it more clear and/or more engaging?

MPOWIR webinar on “career pathways combining education with oceanography”

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For all of you who prefer reading a short-ish blogpost over listening to a nervous Mirjam on a recorded video call on “Career pathways combining education with oceanography“: Read the post below to learn my personal story on the prompt “Many oceanographers find educational activities a rewarding part of their career, where education can range from outreach activities aimed at the general public, to undergraduate and graduate teaching, to training in research through internships and graduate advising. Here three oceanographers describe their experiences working in a variety of educational pathways.” That is the talk I wish I had heard many years ago… (But go watch the recording for Kristi Burkholder and Meg Tivey’s awesome contributions, that are very different from mine! You can always stop watching when I come on ;-))

As you see on my introductory slide (above), I stated there that I was an “oceanographer — science educator — science communicator”. And I want to tell you a little story about what that means.

When I am asked about “what I am”, my first response is that I am a physical oceanographer. And that is true — that is what my identity is all about. If you search for my name on the internet, you find two main keywords: One is #KitchenOceanography and the other is #WaveWatching. Those are two hashtags that I use to describe two hobbies of mine: #KitchenOceanography is about creating hands-on experiments that we can use in teaching and outreach to help us understand the ocean and climate system. #WaveWatching is another hobby — wherever I am, when I see water, I see waves, I have to understand what caused the waves, and then I usually take a picture and post it on social media. So I am an oceanographer. But depending on the context, I might also say that I am a science educator or a science communicator, or any combination of those three, and all of those claims are also true.

I started out on my journey into oceanography by doing a Master’s (equivalent) degree in physical oceanography, and then a PhD. After my PhD I went abroad for my postdoc. My postdoctoral work got published in a Nature Geoscience article on which I was the first author, which was quite positively received and got me invited to speak in many places. Over the next several years, I was involved in several super interesting research campaigns with colleagues from my postdoc days, went on research cruises and to the Coriolis rotating platform in France (a 13-m diameter rotating swimming pool!) to conduct tank experiments. The research we did in France resulted in a Nature article that was published last year. And then in January this year, I started as an adjunct associate professor in the oceanography group at the institution where I did my postdoc.

That’s the classical career so far, when we look at it through the oceanography lens.

But we could also use a different lens. During my PhD, I studied for a Master’s of Higher Education, so I learned and reflected a lot on university teaching. During my postdoc, 25% of my time were dedicated to teaching, and I was lucky enough to be responsible for the “introduction to oceanography” lecture as well as for other courses that dealt with either laboratory experiments or training students on research ships. I additionally taught block courses at other universities. I really enjoyed that part of my job very much, so when I left my postdoc position, I took a position as educational developer. I was not working directly in oceanography then, but the study courses I was responsible for were on shipbuilding and coastal engineering, so close enough that I still felt connected to the ocean. From that service position, I moved on to a research position again, but this time in educational research. And I have been working free-lance on educational projects for many years now.

I already told you that I am currently an adjunct associate professor in the physical oceanography group, and that’s true. The focus of my work, however, is not physical oceanography research, but it’s on education. I am part of a large “Center for Excellence in Education”, and I do educational design and I advise a PhD student and Master students on educational research with questions related to how students at university learn about oceanography.

So that’s the second, the education, lens.

But there is a third one, and that’s the science communication lens. And to me, this is really what made my career my career. When I was teaching so much during my postdoc, I started writing a blog called “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”. At the time, that was really not a well thought-out project. I had been using a lot of hands-on experiments in my teaching, and I had been sharing pictures of those on my facebook, and I was getting a lot of positive feedback and good discussions from my network. But as it turns out, facebook is not a great tool to organize your own thoughts, and I couldn’t find pictures and related discussions as easily as I had hoped. So really to organize my own thoughts better, I started the blog. And the blog is what started me out on this third stand, the “science communication” part of my identity. For the last 7 or so years, I have blogged about my “Adventures in Teaching and Oceanography” — sometimes describing hands-on experiments that people can use in teaching and outreach, sometimes reflecting on literature on science education or communication that I had read, sometimes showing interesting phenomena I came across on the beach, or on puddles in the street.

The blog is what made it possible for me to transition from oceanography into education, and also from educational research into science communication, because I had built a written portfolio of activities in all these fields. And my blogging and social media were partly inspired by what I was doing in different jobs at the time, but they always stayed focussed on the “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”.

About 2.5 years ago, I decided that I would take a part-time position as science communicator to pay my rent, and spend the rest of my free time on the fun projects that had developed both as hobbies and as freelance projects along the way, but without the pressure of having to make a living off of them. So I am currently the program manager of a large science communication project, on a 50% position.

When you search the internet for me these days, however, what you see most prominently are those two hashtags, #KitchenOceanography and #WaveWatching, and that I am someone who works on improving ocean science communication in university teaching and outreach. That is how I see myself, and that’s the image I cultivate through my blog and my social media. Because of that, I have stayed visible to many people at the institution where I did my postdoc, had the opportunity to work on many exciting projects with them while I was working other jobs, and was eventually offered this adjunct associate position. I’ve also been contacted by many people who have hired me to do projects with them or invited me to speak — like today here for MPOWIR.

I want to wrap this up by sharing with you my vision of my ideal job. When I imagine an ideal day, I am doing all the things I am currently doing. I live close to the sea and close to my family (and even though I haven’t talked about that, that definitely influenced my decisions along the way). In the ideal day, I develop hands-on experiments to teach oceanography with, I blog, I talk to my colleagues about their teaching, I work with students, sometimes I lead workshops. I could frame my life right now as “I’m working 50% on a job that is marginally related, and 20% as this, and 30% as that”. But I don’t, because I have this bigger vision for what I want to do and who I am, and that has helped me find my way through many twists and turns to where I am at now.

And now all the small things I do as a hobby, or freelance, or for different employers in different places, contribute to the big picture of my career in both oceanography and education, as an oceanographer, working on engaging others in the wonders of physical oceanography! :)

Watch the webinar below (if you must ;-))

What does “sensemaking” really mean in the context of learning about science? (Reading Odden & Russ, 2019)

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I read the article “Defining sensemaking: Bringing clarity to a fragmented theoretical construct” by Odden and Russ (2019) and what I loved about the article are two main things: I realized that “sensemaking” is the name of an activity I immensely enjoy under certain conditions, and being able to put words to that activity made me really happy! And I found it super helpful that the differences between “sensemaking” and other concepts like “explaining” or “thinking” were pointed out, because that gave me an even clearer idea of what is meant by “sensemaking”.

What is sensemaking? The definition given in the Odden and Russ (2019) article is simple:

Sensemaking is a dynamic process of building or revising an explanation in order to “figure something out”—to ascertain the mechanism underlying a phenomenon in order to resolve a gap or inconsistency in one’s understanding.

Odden and Russ discuss that in the educational science literature, sensemaking has previously been used to mean three different things, that can all be reconceiled under this definition, but that have been discussed mostly independently before:

An approach to learning: Sensemaking can mean really wanting to figure something out by yourself — making sense of an intriguing problem by bringing together what you know, asking yourself questions, building and testing hypotheses, but not asking other people for the correct solution. This is my approach to escape games, for example — I hate using the help cards! I know that it should be possible to figure the puzzles out, so I want to do it myself! This approach is obviously desirable in science learners, since they are not just relying on memorizing responses or assembling surface-level knowledge. They really want to make sense out of something that did not make sense before.
A cognitive process: In this sense, sensemaking is really about how students bring together pieces of previous knowledge and experiences, and new knowledge, and how they integrate them to form a new and bigger coherent structure, for example by using analogies or metaphors.
A way of communicating: Sensemaking then is the collaborative effort to make sense by bringing together different opinions or to construct an explanation, and than critiquing it in order to make sure the arguments are watertight. This can happen both using technical terms and everyday language.

And now how is “sensemaking” different from other, seemingly similar terms? (Or, as the authors say, how can we differentiate sensemaking “from other <good> things to do when learning science”?) This is my summary of the arguments from the article:

Thinking. Compared with sensemaking, thinking is a lot broader. One can do a lot of thinking without attempting to create any new sense. Thinking does not require the critical approach that is essential to sensemaking.

Learning. While sensemaking is a form of learning, there are a lot of other forms that don’t include sensemaking, for example memorization.

Explaining. Sensemaking requires the process of “making sense” of something that previously did not make sense, explanating does not necessarily require that. Depending on the context, explanations can sometimes well be generated out of previous knowledge without building new relationships or anything.

Argumentation. Argumentation is a much wider term than sensemaking — one can for example argue with the goal of persuading someone else rather than building a common understanding and making sense out of information.

Modeling. There is a great overlap between modeling and sensemaking, but sensemaking is typically more dynamic and short-term, whereas modeling is a more formal activity that can take place over days and weeks, sometimes with the purpose of communicating ideas.

I found reading this article enlightening because it is giving me a language to talk about sensemaking, to articulate nuances, that I previously did not have. By reflecting on situations where I really enjoy sensemaking (another example is wave watching: I am trying to make sense of what I see by running through questions in my head. Can I observe what causes the waves? Is their behavior consistent with what I would expect given what I can observe about the topography? If not, what does that tell me about the topogaphy in places where I can’t observe it?) and on others where I don’t (thinking of times in school when I did not see the point of trying to make sense out of something [as in make all the individual pieces of previous knowledge and new information fit together coherently without conflict] and just needed to go though the motions of it to pass a test or something), I find it intriguing to think about why I sometimes engage in the process and enjoy it, and sometimes I don’t even try to engage.

How does it work for you, do you know under what conditions you engage in sensemaking, and under which don’t you?

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Odden, T. O. B., & Russ, R. S. (2019). Defining sensemaking: Bringing clarity to a fragmented theoretical construct. Science Education, 103(1), 187-205.

My two favourite methods for re-activating and re-focussing workshop participants

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I have always hated workshops where you had to do “active stuff”, moving around to music and the like, because the facilitator wanted to “get everybody active!”. But recently I’ve come to appreciate the value in that (better late than never, right?).

So what I occasionally do these days, sometimes after a break or when the workshop starts early in the morning or right in my post-lunch-I-need-a-nap-time and participants seem to have low energy levels, but mainly when I realize that I’ve been talking for too long and need to re-focus everybody’s attention, are two small activities.

I forget where I first learned about the first one (I was talking to a friend, but can’t remember who that was! If it was you, let me know and I will happily credit you here!), but this is what I started out using: I asked participants to put two fingers towards the camera and move them up and down, drawing lines. When they are doing that, I ask them to move on to the next level of difficulty: Drawing triangles. Then squares. Then … no, not pentagons! … one hand does the triangle while the other one does the square. At this point people try, struggle, laugh, and are awake again so I can move on to some engaging activity related to the actual topic of my class.

(In my teaching prep, this method is called |Δ▢ , in case you need a name for it :-D)

The second method I learned from Kjersti when talking about liking the first one. In this method, you are drawing circles with your fingers in front of your chest, with the axis of those cicles parallel to your shoulders. But: the hands are drawing the circles in the opposite directions! When the fingers move apart at the top of the circle, one hand moves towards you while the other hand moves away from you. They meet up at the bottom of the circle, where then the other hand moves towards you and away from you. Sounds complicated? Try doing it! The effect is the same as in method one.

What other methods are you using when you need to “wake people up” so you can re-engage with them?