Vacuums and Moving Ropes

I just spent about three hours transcribing this 5 minute segment and reviewed it in order to recognize how much I had missed but I am going to forge ahead anyway. I have to say that the experience of transcribing was a very powerful learning experience for me. It is really amazing how much is going on in this 5 minutes of video and how little of it I understand. Broadly speaking these participants are negotiating the physical scenario as well as both a whiteboard representation and an ET representation in order to enact their second energy theater.

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This clip shows participants wrestling with decisions that they will have to make in order to construct a representation. The are confronted with a context in which some of the decisions about their representations are totally up to them and other decisions are not flexible.

Lezlie explicitly empowers them to take ownership and poetic license of their representation:

"You can choose to ignore whatever you are choosing to ignore. You have that liberty to take so if you want to say, 'I think we are just going to stick to the water in the bowl and the bowl and the ice pack."

Two participants immediately pick up on this:

Megan says, "Well an idea would be just do the ice and water right now and then obviously we can add in once we get good at it, all the other things."

Debra raises her hand to speak immediately after Lezlie empowers her to 'take liberty' and then later says, " And then you've got the rope (motions to floor) You could take like you said the one... the heat with the energy... maybe you could have one rope wiggle around and the other rope not moving so much... and then..and then they come together... I mean you put them together in one rope to two ropes and one is wiggling alot and one is not wiggling that much and then slow one down and then they come as equals... I don't know. "

Megan's idea is consistent with a rigorous ET representation and also likely to lead to progress with their representation. Group members provide several justifications for following Megan's approach:

• Focus only apparently relevant stuff, "Barb - Do they have anything to do with it? I'm just..."
• Start simple, "...obviously we can add in once we get good at it, all the other things."
• Analogy to a simpler system, "Brian - Sitting in a vaccuum"

Megan's idea is also challenged in several ways:

• Need for completeness, "Bill - Everything is connected (circular motion with hands)."
• External constraint, "Bill - Then my only question is that when we say it is room temperature water"

The group seems to keep holding Megan's idea in tension for the remainder of the episode.

In contrast, Debra's idea is only momentarily taken up by the group. Megan tries to affirm it but gets confused and then Brian comes in with the whiteboard to present a suggested way forward. It is not clear to me whether Christine is building on Debra idea when she suggests that the constant air temperature could be represented by a rope that is not moving. The idea is also in conflict with the rule in energy theater that ropes designate objects.

When Christine makes this proposal Megan immediately shows visible alarm and Lezlie moves close Christine to intervene.

At that point Lezlie directs the conversation toward proportional reasoning about temperature and thermal energy.

To me this video suggests the need for building group consensus about both the representational decisions and the rationale behind those decisions. In the case of Megan's proposal Lezlie tells them that they have the liberty to decide, but that affirmation alone is not satisfying. They need to work out as a group a rationale for making the decision about which objects to include.

In Debra and Christine's case they do not engage the opportunity to rationalize what should and should not be represented by rope motion or lack of it. The idea of using rope motion to represent a variety of things will persist for participants. I think they will need to build a shared consensus of what the rope should and should not represent and a rationale for the consensus. For example, maybe it is OK if moving ropes show moving objects as long as the motion does not represent energy. This could be based on a rationale that ET should always be constrained to show energy conservation.