"I would basically self-define myself as someone who has spent, essentially, an entire professional career trying to fundamentally unpack this notion of how people learn..."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thriving in the Knowledge Age provides an entirely new way of envisioning the business model for your cultural institution.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Because motivation is actually fundamental to learning and if the only context in which you're studying learning is a context in which the motivation is artificially imposed then you're only looking at a fairly narrow slice of the nature of learning."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Principle, In Practice aims to develop strategies for implementing and sustaining connections between research and practice in the museum community. [Grant#ESI-0318868]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"I think there's an opportunity to expand and build this community. Ideally it is about creating a space where it is safe for both practitioners and researchers to share ideas and to learn from each other."

 

 

 

An interview with John Falk about the importance of context in learning research and the reasons why visitors attend informal learning institutions.

Interview by Kevin Crowley :: Fall 2007

Crowley: To begin, how would you define yourself professionally?

Falk: I would basically self-define myself as someone who has essentially spent an entire professional career trying to fundamentally unpack this notion of how people learn—but in a very course grained way, not a neurobiology sense. I started out doing what could be construed as environmental psychology, which is grounded in understanding and appreciating that context matters, and in particular, a belief that the setting in which you are affects how and what you learn. In a world where the words learning, education, and school were treated as synonyms, and in which psychology research was by and large done in the laboratory, the assumption was that context didn't matter. Why would it make a difference that we have undergraduates that we're paying to do stupid things in a laboratory?  Does that tell you fundamental things about the nature of learning? Well, it might, but it also might tell you what undergraduates do when they get paid to do stupid things in a laboratory. So, really trying to look at how people were learning and behaving in real-world contexts seemed to be very interesting to me and important.

Somewhere down the line folks told me there are these places called museums and they'll actually pay you to do this research, which was a great novelty.  So, I started doing more and more of my research in museums. Although I've spent a lot of years trying to understand why people go to museums, what they do there, and what they take away from it, it has never been my overriding passion to merely understand these questions. Museums are an interesting context in which to do that work, but they are also a means to an end. Now over the past twenty years I've developed a lot friends and colleagues and feel very attached to that community, but intellectually that is not what's driving me to do what I do.

Crowley: As we think about informal science as a field, what is the role of research? We are interested to hear your thoughts about the relationship of these two worlds and, in particular, what Ph.D. training ought to look like? What kinds of students ought we to be preparing?

Falk: The short answer is that I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to say that I could answer that question. But, I do think that it is important to create graduate programs in free-choice learning, informal education—whatever you want to call it—for a couple of reasons. I'm always mindful of policy and political reasons, and I think that it's important to legitimize the importance of serious inquiry in this area and to help validate that serious people can do serious work. We live in a world where providing the imprimatur of academia upon it helps move it in that direction. But, in a more pure sense, there are important questions and learnings that I think can be achieved through more serious study. It is an intellectual community that is very rich, in terms of providing insights into fundamental questions of the nature of learning, which are obscured when all you're looking through is the lens of the classroom or the lens of the laboratory. Because actually, motivation is fundamental to learning: If the only context in which you're studying learning is a context in which motivation is artificially imposed, then you're only looking at a fairly narrow slice of the nature of learning.

In addition to that, it is a growing and vibrant community of practice, and I mean practice in the sense of people who are actually committed to supporting the public's learning. I certainly believe that there are principles and ideas that can improve the quality of that practice and that this can be accomplished through research.  And so, throughout my career, I have been devoted to trying to come up with some insights that might be useful in terms of helping people get better at what they do. You can get better at it by a truly empirical trial and error approach. But arguably, you can make quantum leaps forward if you have an underlying construct and theory that guides you so that those insights then flow much more freely than trying to invent and by trial and error figure out every solution. So, it is in search of those over-arching constructs that I really have spent the better part of my life trying to figure out.  Whether I have figured out anything of value is another issue, but it is in pursuit of that.

Getting back to your question … if it is just me, you, and a handful of other people doing this work, then there are limitations. If, on the other hand, we can build a larger infrastructure and in that sense really build a discipline, then there are significant opportunities for economies of scope and scale to occur, and we can get there quicker.

Crowley: You mentioned information to help practice, and you've certainly worked with and written a lot for practitioners. How does that relationship between research and practice get facilitated?

Falk: Well, I don't claim to have any answers but I think the solution is likely to come through some kind of meaningful communication and dialogue between those communities.

It’s about creating a context in which there can be feedback, in the sense that an academic theoretician can do a line of research that they perceive to be intellectually interesting and useful, but in a way that allows opportunities for practitioners to give feedback along the way and that presumably helps them refine their understanding of what is interesting and useful. And visa versa, in the sense that a practitioner can be in search of insights and can have an opportunity to communicate with a theoretician or researcher in a way that informs whether they are reinventing the wheel, or using models of epistemology that may be inaccurate or misguided because all of us have an underlying assumption about what constitutes the nature of learning.

If you are designing an exhibit or writing a book or developing a play or whatever the medium is that you're trying to communicate something to somebody else, you have an implicit model about the nature of learning. What a researcher and a theoretician can do is potentially help refine that model because often that model practioners hold is not quite in sync with what people who do research on learning would argue is the nature of the way people learn. It is one of those truisms that people have been trying to understand and think about learning for thousands of years and we've probably gained more insight into the nature of learning in the last twenty years than in the previous thousands of years.

Crowley: Do you have a favorite example from your work about how research and practice have been able to find common language and open each other's eyes to new possibilities?

Falk: One example in formal education where there have been understandings in research—in fact I alluded to that a minute ago—understandings which theoretically permeated the system but, in fact, you go back and you find that the same old ideas are still being reinvented and being reinvented poorly.

Very early in my career I was very interested in the impact of novelty on how people—children in particular—deal with learning. Arguably, one thing that is particularly appealing about taking children to places like museums or national parks, zoos, aquariums and all those kinds of places, is that they are novel places. They are not the kinds of places that you go to everyday. It's not where you live your life. As a consequence, the research suggested that there is a curve in terms of dealing with and adapting to that novelty, and that providing opportunities for learners to achieve a degree of comfort in that new setting is imperative. And actually, you will achieve your goals if you allow children to achieve their goals first. Each generation seems to rediscover the fact that this might make sense, but nonetheless I think that it was an insight that has had at least some impact on practice.

I've been quipping of late that I've spent the last 30 years trying to figure out why people go to places like museums. What do they do there and what do they take away with them? I have what I hope is not a misguided belief that, within the last couple years, I’m finally figuring it out.  I had this "great insight" over twenty years ago that if you really want to understand what people are doing in a museum, you cannot understand that by merely looking at people in museums. So much of what determines what somebody does in that institution is determined by what they bring with them. To explain the amount of variance about why people do what they do and what they think about as a consequence of going through an institution like a museum is, in fact, determined by what they come with in terms of prior knowledge, experience, interest, motivation, beliefs, etc. 

Over the last number of years, I've been trying to figure out how you capture that in a relatively easy way. The approach that I came upon was this­–to think about it in terms of not really trying to step outside of the institutional perspective of what's important because if you take an institutional perspective. If you say, I'm going to a science museum, then what must be important is how much science somebody knows. Or, if you're going to a zoo that's trying to communicate about conservation, then obviously what must be important are people's entering attitudes about conservation. Interestingly enough, that was a box that was really hard to step out of because you're sort of in that box and therefore to see that there could be an outside of that box is very hard.

Crowley: Can you talk about the role identity plays in your thinking about a learner in a museum setting?

Falk: My insight is that it’s not identity with a capital "I", which is traditionally how academics have studied identity – these firmly held beliefs about the nature of who I am.  I am a white male, free-choice learning researcher. That's my identity. Well, that may be my identity, but that's not why I go to a museum. I go to a museum based on reasons that have to do with identity with a little "i" like, "Well, it's Saturday. What should I do today? Well, I've got my kids with me so, hey, that would be a good thing to do."  Putting on my today's identity: I'm a parent and I'm going to do what's good for my kids today. Tomorrow, since I happen to be a parent who’s has co-custody of children, I could be without children. Tomorrow I may also decide to go to a different museum, but tomorrow when I go to the museum I'm not wearing that hat as a parent. I'm wearing that hat as someone who decided to go to a museum, to an art museum because I happen to like art.  And so, I am going to just satisfy my curiosity about what's there. It turns out—although there are theoretically an infinite number of reasons why people go to places like museums—when you boil it down there are not an infinite number of reasons. They are very finite.

Part of the reason that there are a finite number of reasons is because these are cultural institutions, and as a society we have defined that these institutions should satisfy certain needs and there are other places that satisfy other needs. And so, in theory, you could go to a museum in order to exercise and work up a sweat jogging around the halls, but that's not why most people would choose to go to museums. As a society, we say that gyms are good places for doing that or jogging trails are good places for doing that. Museums are not good places. So, actually society has constrained the choices to a fairly narrow subset. In fact, arguably, there are five reasons why people go to museums.

When you look at visitors through that identity lens, you find that, not only can you segment visitors and easily sort them into one of five categories, it turns out that these categories subsume their interest, their variance, their prior knowledge, and their motivations. Those are encapsulated in those identities. That is literally what they walk in with, and more importantly it dictates what they do and what meaning they make from that experience afterwards. So, if you talk to them as they're walking out the door or anywhere from a month to a year later and have them describe their experience, they are framed within the contexts of the motivations in which they came. “Basically, I came for this reason. Because I came for this reason, I used the space for this reason to satisfy this and I decide that it was successful because I was able to satisfy that agenda.” Well, it hasn't yet, but arguably this could and should transform practice because, in flight of hyperbole, this is the Rosetta Stone that allows you to translate what's going on in these settings. It simplifies what has been historically and inaccurately perceived as a very complex setting with lots of people doing lots of different things into a manageable way of saying: There are groups of people that I can define who are using this facility in very, very similar ways for very similar outcomes. In fact, you can predict what those behaviors and outcomes will be. That should dramatically change the nature of practice, as well as marketing and assessment.

Crowley: What are the five reasons why people go to museums?

Falk: The five come into what I've called, the Explorers, Facilitators, Experience-Seekers, Professional Hobbyists, and Spiritual Pilgrims.  To unpack these a little, Explorers are people that self-define themselves as interested, curious people. They believe that by going to these places, this will be a wonderful setting to exercise that curiosity. It tends to be content-specific so generically I'm curious and interested, but if I'm a science-person I will be predisposed to go to a science center to exercise that curiosity. If I love animals, I will be predisposed to go to a zoo to experience and explore and allow that to wash over me, but that's not mutually exclusive. The Explorer is not going to the setting to learn anything in particular; they're going to, in general, find out more information and see what's going to stimulate their curiosity and interest.

Facilitators—and for an Explorer, it's all about "me". By firm contrast, for Facilitators it's all about somebody else. I'm a parent or Aunt Mildred's coming and she really likes science, so let's take her to the science center. My satisfaction is derived by virtue of having my significant other satisfied. If you talk to the Explorer a month later, they say, "Actually, I had never thought of it before but there was this really cool exhibit on televisions and I really found that fascinating."  The Facilitator will say, "Billy was really interested in that exhibit on televisions and it was so much fun and so satisfying to see Billy get involved in that exhibit on televisions."  So, very different motivations and very different sense of satisfaction.

In a sense, the Experience-Seeker is in some ways a blend. The most experience-seekers are either also Facilitators or also Explorers. By and large, what sets them apart is this is about being in a place and feeling that, you know, in order to satisfy my sense of experiencing this place, I need to go and do and see this thing because people tell me that this is a great place to go. So, I'm in Pittsburgh and I ask at the hotel, "What do you do when you're in Pittsburgh?" And they say, "Well, you've got kids. Carnegie Science Center is a great place to go with your kids." So, I will go to the Carnegie Science Center in order to say, "I did the right thing when I was in Pittsburgh. And besides my kids had a great time." In fact, they will often characterize their visit in terms of that generic experience, "It was fun." It was satisfying to have been there, seen that, and done that.

The last two groups are very interesting. They do not represent large percentages, but they are significant minorities with very different agendas. The Professional Hobbyist is the individual who actually is motivated to go in order to satisfy a very specific agenda. I'll give you two examples. I interviewed an individual who was a science teacher and who said he liked to go to places like science centers because he's always looking for new ideas to bring into the classroom and these folks at science centers are real creative and come up with great ways to demonstrate scientific principles. I'm always looking for new ideas and this is a great way to satisfy that.  So, that's the lens that this individual is going to be looking through. On a more personal note, I'm a diver but I don't dive all that often—maybe once every year or two. So, before I go on a dive I like to visit an aquarium, where I can literally refresh my memory to be able to identify tropical fish, because when I'm on a dive I can be much better at that. I don’t have to look through a field guide, which I can't have underwater—or I can, but with great difficulty. So, this is a way I use the aquarium to meet a need that I have as a hobbyist.

Spiritual Pilgrims are individuals who literally are using these spaces to refresh themselves, or as Stephen Kaplan talks about, instead of recreation, it’s re-creation. They find places like aquariums, art museums to be places that you can get away from the maddening crowd. They're quiet. You can be content with it. They are restorative.  And they literally use the space in order to accomplish that goal. And so, again, when you talk to them and they reflect upon their experiences they say, "It was really great.  I came away feeling rejuvenated by virtue of what I did. "; And you'll ask them, "What did you do?"  And they'll say, "Well, I sort of walked around and I saw some interesting things."  But it wasn't about seeing interesting things. It truly was having peace and quiet and getting away from, and being in, an interesting setting.  And so, these experiences are self-reinforcing and they provide a fairly interesting and fairly reliable indicator as to how people experience these settings.

Crowley: What do you think the priority should be for InformalScience.org going forward?

Falk: I think there's an opportunity to expand and build this community. Ideally, it is about creating a space where it is safe for both practitioners and researchers to share ideas and to learn from each other in a respectful way. It is not about hierarchies that suggest there are the people who know things and then there are people who seek that information. The best possibility would be a space where researchers could learn from practitioners and practitioners could learn from researchers. That's a tall order, but I think it's an ideal that would be wonderful to achieve.