V. Analysis/Synthesis of Framing Context

What are your key takeaways from the framing context readings and activities and how are they informing your thinking about your project?

While we are bound to continue narrowing our focus, the framing context readings and activities we’ve done have helped us identify key areas for learning opportunities: we honed our initial topic of “sustainability” to focus on addressing students’ decision-making knowledge within a given common scenario (e.g. grocery shopping, exact scenario tbd) in order to help them learn broadly applicable strategies for sustainable decision making.

Stakeholder Mapping

Our initial mapping reminded us that everyone is a stakeholder when it comes to sustainability because, as one of our interviewees summarized: “[sustainability] affects the economy, what I can wear and what I can heat, how healthy I can be, and the kinds of wonderful things I can experience in life.” In our subsequent stakeholder mapping of hopes and fears, examining students’ hopes and fears in relation to professors’ and school administration’s demonstrated that their sentiments are aligned when it comes to fearing the consequences of inaction—however, differing priorities can sometimes mean that these stakeholders’ perspectives and approaches to sustainable action are at odds with one another. Our findings point to developing mutual understanding as a potentially important part of successfully aligning on sustainable actions.

Learning Gaps

In analyzing the learning gaps we identified, we see opportunities to align students’ motivations with their environments, as well as build skills to help them feel empowered in pursuing sustainability-oriented actions. Students may feel helpless or unmotivated to make changes; we can aid students in determining what they deem to be the most impactful areas to take action. Students may understand that sustainability is important, but not how to align it with their actions; we can help them learn skills to apply sustainability knowledge to decision points such as making a purchase. Given that students might have widely varying levels of knowledge about sustainability, Dirksen’s passage on novice and expert learners helps us begin to think through how we might apply different strategies to “scaffold” their experiences of the content, including focusing on one thing at a time, using walkthroughs, and making information available when it’s most needed (p41).

4MAT Plotting

This exercise was helpful in separating the “what” (content) and “how” (design) of the learning experience we will create. We discovered that we may need to revisit the activity as we continue to develop specificity. The information we need to include in the learning experience will no doubt be influenced by the scenario we decide to focus our learning experience on. However, we were able to identify the broad areas of relevance, practice, and application that we aim to address through our learning experience.

McCarthy — Learning

McCarthy classifies learners by four “types” based on how they prefer to perceive information (more abstractly or concretely) and process information (more reflectively or actively). The in-class activity we did helped us to understand our own learning types, and because none of us on this team have worked together before, it’s helpful to see where we all fall. Having this knowledge will hopefully help us to interpret each others’ responses to new information, as well as push us to learn through (and design for!) more active processing since we lean towards reflective processing overall.

Next Steps

From the feedback on our presentation, we can identify a few places to focus the development of our ideas further:

• How will we help students to visualize and assess the impact of their actions over time?
• Can our learning experience assist new actions and activities in becoming “the norm”?
• How will we balance addressing varying perceptions of sustainability and reasons for not taking action?
• How will the methods we use for learning align or deviate from the long term outcomes we would hope for learners to see?