Free-Choice Learning:
Year in Review
New Faculty
Free-Choice learning explores how people learn in informal settings when they perceive they have a choice in what, how, and when they learn. While last year firmly introduced and established the effort, this year further anchored this cutting-edge concept throughout Oregon Sea Grant and the Oregon State University campus with the hiring of Free-Choice Learning pioneers Drs. John Falk and Lynn Dierking into a Sea Grant professorship position. Response to this innovative approach to informal education continues to be positive. This year the entire Science and Math Education department is responding to Free-Choice Learning by revisioning itself completely along the lines of lifelong learning and the role that plays in a community.
Students
Dr. Shawn Rowe, Marine Education Learning Specialist, is not only actively sharing the Free-Choice Learning Program with people and programs across the nation, but is successfully overseeing the practical application of Free-Choice Learning through the advising and mentoring of 11 students who have chosen to incorporate Free-Choice Learning into their graduate or doctoral degrees. His first student, Bree Benton, graduated this year, and Rowe calls her project to codify and link the activities of the SMILE Program with state and national standards a great example of working with scientists and university educators to provide high quality, research-based professional development for school teachers, after-school science education providers and curriculum materials for elementary and middle school students. Another student will graduate in June and several others are in the final stages of their Free-Choice Learning projects and studies. Rowe facilitated a 12-week paid internship at the Oregon Coast Aquarium for Coral Gehrke and her initial research and evaluation findings around visitor movement at the facility have already been instrumental in decision-making there and Christine Smith has been hired as an intern to complete an evaluation of the Aquarium's outreach program. Meanwhile, Ethan Herget's project describing the differences between "natural" and "recreated" tide pools is expected to provide pilot data for a potential future NSF ISE proposal. Alicia Christensen's research focused on the popular Whale Watching Spoken Here! program on the Oregon coast, Heidi Schmook completed research on family learning as part of the Las OLAS project, and Molly Phipps' work this year has centered on how people understand and use satellite images in the Visitor Center. She works with satellite and shipboard data and how to make scientific visualizations more accessible to visitors.
Outreach
Through his travels and attendance at conferences, Rowe shared information about Free-Choice Learning and the work and research being done at OSU with colleagues at the National Association of Research in Science Teaching (NARST) and the American Educational Research Association. In his trip to the University of Wisconsin, he had the opportunity to speak to a lifelong learning group at a seminar on Frontiers in Life Science. He spoke on Life at Deep-Sea Vents to the Wednesday Nite @ the Lab group there, and met with the College of Education Outreach about their interest in an Internet II workshop on Free-Choice Learning. At Discovery World, he discovered potential opportunities for interns from OSU, and jobs for graduates. At various times throughout the year, he presented Free-Choice Learning information to the Sea Grant Programs in Wisconsin, Alaska, and Maryland.
Teaching
He and fellow Extension faculty member, Flaxen Conway, designed and co-taught a three-session evaluation workshop to Sea Grant Extension faculty and staff and then Rowe traveled to Puerto Rico to deliver a similar workshop to the National Sea Grant Communicators gathered there for an annual Sea Grant meeting. When the FESRI group formed to assist salmon fishermen as a result of the shutdown of the salmon season, Rowe provided evaluation materials to this fisherman as educators group and taught them how to administer and use them in their own public presentations.
During the Summer Session at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, Rowe taught a course on Understanding Free-Choice Learning for Education and Outreach that included the psychological, physical, sociological, Web- and place-based aspects of Free-Choice Learning research and theory. On campus he co-taught a Communicating Ocean Sciences to Informal Audiences course designed to pair future teachers with future scientists to go out to informal education sites together and create learning activities for Free-Choice Learning audiences in an informal science-learning venue in order to interact with the public using hands-on materials that communicate basic ocean-sciences concepts and he helped present a section on Designing Free-Choice Learning Marine Science Activities to an undergraduate Oceanography class.
Rowe is working with OSU's Center for Teaching and Learning and the Department of Design and Human Environment, along with the Herman Miller company, to create a model teaching/learning space on campus that will be used to train university professors to be better teachers using new technologies and new pedagogies, including research on FCL. He's also working with Herman Miller and Office World to create a model teaching and learning space at the Hatfield Marine Science Center that allows for lectures and demonstrations, as well as hands-on collaborative learning and Free-Choice Learning activities. And, using the Visitor Center as a research laboratory, he's involved with a project that is researching the effectiveness of the visitor use of iPods and PDAs as a supplemental teaching tool to the exhibits there.