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By Michael Childs
mchilds@coe.uga.edu
John Schell, an associate professor of occupational studies, has had a “whale of a time” i ncorporating contextual teaching and learning principles into one of his graduate-level classes.
Literally.
A chance encounter on a whale-watching excursion off the coast of Massachusetts in the summer of 1998 led Schell to take two classes of UGA students out to sea--in order to learn more about how to teach students on land.
“My first encounter with the humpback whales was indeed transformational,” Schell says. “I was mesmerized by the majesty of the whales as they watched us watch them.”
Humpbacks are baleen whales--instead of teeth they have baleen, a filtering screen that traps their food. As whales go, they are not exceedingly large, but that is definitely a relative comparison, says Schell. A full-size humpback is about the size of a school bus, 40 to 50 feet long and weighing 40 to 45 tons.
During his 1998 whale-watching excursion, Schell visited with the on-board naturalist, Cynde Bierman, discussing how whales are threatened by toxic chemicals and learning about the Ocean Alliance and Whale Conservation Institute. When Bierman learned that Schell conducted research about education, she invited him to return to the sea the next morning as a special guest, to critique the educational program on the boat.
Schell and Bierman kept in touch that winter and he returned to Massachusetts the next summer to do a faculty internship with the Ocean Alliance and Whale Conservation Institute for the contextual teaching and learning project. The CTL project is a three-year, $1.8 million pilot
program funded by the U.S. Department of Education aimed at preparing future public school teachers to make teaching and learning more relevant to work and other real-life contexts.
Through the internship, Schell brought his graduate-level class in situated cognition to Massachusetts for a week to help WCI naturalists redesign their on-boat educational program. The class developed situated-learning experiences that connected whale watching with broader ecological issues. A second class of Schell’s returned this past summer.
“For the second year in a row, we have involved UGA students in working with both the public and public-school teachers who are clients of the Whale Conservation Institute/Ocean Alliance,” says Schell. “Our mutual objective is to promote conservation and a clean environment through educating adults and children. The whales are the media for that effort.”
The first year, Schell’s class included 13 master’s and doctoral students from occupational studies and adult education. This summer, the class had seven graduate students from the two departments--all practicing middle school teachers--plus an undergraduate student in science education.
“The focus on this year’s class was on preparing middle-school children for a whale-watching experience,” Schell explains. “In teams, our UGA students worked with local teachers in the Gloucester and Rockport (Mass.) areas on the delivery of a whale lesson based on communities-of-practice theory. After the children and their teachers experienced the whales, they participated in a follow-up reflective activity.”
Schell is already looking ahead to his third situation-cognition class next summer. Working with Boston-area teachers, he will focus on giving the whale-watching experience greater educational impact.
And just what is situated cognition?
“I’ve characterized it as natural learning that takes place in natural settings,” says Schell. “The theory of situated cognition is based on two primary positions that have emerged from research. First, learning is essentially a social phenomenon. And second, learning is rooted in the context in which it is learned. Both of these perspectives represent a fairly radical departure from traditional views of psychological learning and of the classroom as the optimal place for learning.”
The theme of Schell’s course is how to align these situated-learning assumptions with the art of teaching.
“If we have learned something about how individuals learn naturally, what implications are there for us as teachers?” Schell asks. “How can we apply these ideas to make learning more effective?”
The Massachusetts whales offer a place for Schell’s students to practice answering such questions.
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