Decomposing an interaction: Part 4

This is the fourth of five blog posts about the 70-minute interaction between Stamatis and group 1 (see the first three here, here, and here). The episode below is the group interaction that inspired me to look at the Stamatis-group_1 interaction in the first place.

To put things into context: the 70-minute interaction happened Thursday morning, and this episode occurred in the afternoon. Earlier in the afternoon, Rachel gave her ‘ontologies’ talk, in which she quoted Feynman as saying something to the effect of, “Energy is this magical thing for which the total number of units never changes, no matter the process.” (The gist of the statement, to me, is that we don’t know why this happens, we just know that it does.) This apparently resonated with Don and Tim, who called it “liberating.”

After a short break, the group was brought back together (minus Rachel), and Leslie (flying solo, no Stamatis present this afternoon) asked the group made up of Derrick, Bruce, Don, Tim, and Jim to share what they had come up with in the morning (i.e., during their interaction with Stamats). (Recall that the ‘objective’ of the morning was to answer the question, “Why?,” with respect to energy transfers and transformations.)

After some (seemingly unrelated) conversation about energy flowing “from high to low” (or from high to low energy density), the group (now including Leslie) talk some about forces. However, they did not seem to be addressing the original question (“explain why/how transfers and transformations happen”), and thus Leslie asks, “What is the causal story?” This is where the video starts -- note that the video is split into two parts. (Episodes are named 'fishing for misconceptions part 1a' and 'fishing for misconceptions part 2a.')

I was originally struck by their strong statements, that they felt they were “trying to over classify things,” that Stamatis had “wanted them to go someplace they weren’t able to go” or that he was “fishing for misconceptions.” I was also struck by their apparent devaluation of the question in the first place (and Nina’s contrasting valuing of the question). (As a side note, I’m still learning about Rogers, but from my naïve perspective, Leslie was behaving quite Rogerian-ly :)…)

I find this video particularly interesting after observing the entire morning interaction, because I didn’t get the feeling that Stamatis was ‘fishing for misconceptions,’ so I wonder why they thought so. [There was only one point at which I can confidently identify a moment where Stamatis may have been ‘unseating a misconception’ (although that’s not what I’d call it). (That moment would be when the group said that energy moves from high to low energy, and Stamatis gave an example in which he poured a small cup of coffee in a large body of water and asked which direction the energy would flow.)] And I find it interesting (but not necessarily surprising) that they were aware enough of themselves to articulate that they didn’t get where Stamatis wanted them to go.