That I.D.E.A. acronym was Margaret's last word in Understanding Energy 2, and it's too good. In reflecting on the week, I thought about two kinds of interest-driven education -- mine, and theirs.
My own interest-driven education this past week was primarily about my direct relationship with the teachers and the development of my personal definitions of energy, forms, and force.
My direct relationship with the teachers: I originally posted about this on the first day of class. Here is a photo that is moving for me, because I am on the other side of the camera. I am having a really enjoyable and informative conversation with Lisa and Margaret, and I feel really grateful to be included seamlessly in what they are doing. They called me over to the table because they wanted someone to talk to about elevators.
This is the first year that I have engaged in such a direct relationship with the teachers. In earlier years, we all (teachers and videographers) pretended that the videographers were invisible: even though we were right there in the same room, we really never spoke to each other, not even at breaks. This was really awkward. This year, teachers were talking to scholars through the mic in what felt like a very charming and natural way: "Who's listening to us now - Enrique? Is that you? Could we ask you something?" It was Krishna, and he went over to the table to talk to them. I felt like the openness helped them perceive our presence as benevolent.
My personal definitions of energy, forms, and force: see this earlier post.
My observation of the teachers' interest-driven education has me thinking about their proliferation of questions and their sense of self-efficacy to pursue those questions.
Teachers' proliferation of questions
Teachers' sense of self-efficacy
What's next for me? A primary goal for me in 2011-2012 is to support the Energy Project in producing full papers on our work. So far we've given a lot of presentations and written (or are writing, this week!) a bunch of proceedings papers. That's great, and appropriate for a new-ish project in which many of the participants are just coming on to the research scene. I think that now our work is mature enough that we are ready to (and ought to) be submitting full papers. I am hoping to first-author one on embodied learning activities; I hope Sam will first-author one on energy forms (you can see she's been thinking about it a lot), and I hope Hunter will first-author one on gesture/concept differentiation (or however he sees it).
Also on my mind are the August EPSRI, the changes on the Energy Project team as the Closes move to Texas and new colleagues arrive here, and the potential for elementary classroom observations in 2011-2012 with some of the teachers who we now know well. For the first time ever, they approached me to invite me to observe. The Energy Project has no elementary classroom data yet.
In writing this up I realized that I had asked everyone else to say who they were, in order for us all to better understand the significance of the EPSRI week to each scholar... but I didn't do that myself. I am Project Director and Senior Researcher for the Energy Project, and am the EPSRI Director along with Sam. My primary research interest is in analyzing richly detailed (video) records of successful learning activities in order to better understand what is happening in them. The teacher professional development that takes place at SPU provides a teaching and learning experience (and a data set!) that is richer, more inspiring, and more complex than any other I have seen; I spend all year analyzing what we record in the summer and I feel like I'm not even scratching the surface. The EPSRI provides the Energy Project (and me) not only with mission-critical data collection and management, but also with valuable insights, research questions, themes, intellectual resources, and professional community. It might be my favorite thing that we do.
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