St8ED.

Our final meeting at MOSI was quite an adventure. At many points, I felt like I was part of a Looney Tunes cartoon and at some point someone was going to pull out an ACME anvil. This is not to say that the meeting was cartoonish, just that, as the culmination of a semester-long project, it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. Perhaps it was strange that at the last minute we were introduced to a new stakeholder who had a completely divergent view about research than our initial MOSI partner. Perhaps it was the need to justify our work at the time when we should be presenting. Perhaps it was the failure of any one explanation to appease more than one person in the room due to the variance in perspectives. Regardless of reason, this final meeting turned into a representative snippet of our 16-week experience.

Even as we wrote our executive summary (a format requested by D, our contact), our group was struggling with whether we actually completed an action research project. In all of our readings this spring, we found action research to be a lot of things, but three things stood out as kind of hallmarks of action research: 1. desire to fix a problem, 2. cogeneration of knowledge, and 3. Action!. As we considered how well our project addressed these two areas, we became quite discouraged. For one, we never really identified a problem that needed fixing (well, we ultimately did, but I’ll get to that in a minute). Further, while our contact at MOSI was extremely supportive and available to us, we were never able to bridge the gap between client and cogenerator. We tried several approaches to further include D in our research, but it never panned out. I have a theory about this: I think that traditional research paradigms are so entrenched that it is extremely difficult to successfully overcome traditional research expectations in practice. I think these barriers are most successfully overcome when either the problem itself is so dire that action needs to be taken immediately to solve it (think gulf oil spill), or sufficient time is spent educating all researchers involved (both from academia and industry or community). This is done typically in some type of search conference (See Greenwood & Levin, 2007). Ultimately, I think a proper action research project needs more than a semester to truly work. That said, I think our project at MOSI gave us the opportunity to experience firsthand many of the perpetual tensions of action research. I want to say more about this, but it will have to wait for my final reflections entry.

So, back to the meeting. I don’t really want to get into the specifics of the meeting on this public platform, but instead want to use this space to reflect on how the meeting solidified my understanding of action research and how it paralleled our group experience.

1. Communication is Key. There was a point in the meeting when it became clear that there was a rather large communication gap among staff at MOSI. This did not come out in a negative way; it just simply emerged as fact. There was likely no need for the parties involved to discuss a particular issue, so they didn’t. In our action research group, we had this same problem. While we were talking all the time about the project, we weren’t saying the right things. As a result, there were times when things either didn’t get done or got done twice because we were failing to communicate effectively with each other. If I were to do the project again, I would create a more specific plan (even if it changed along the way) so group members have a more substantive idea of the process and how individual responsibilities relate to the collective objective. This does not completely solve the problem of knowing what to say, to whom, and when, but it provides some sort of framework.
2. There is Negative in Everything. Early on in the meeting, someone from MOSI mentioned that it is easy to find the problem but not easy to develop solutions. The statement was made in response to some critiques we had for some of the exhibits on the floor. And he was right. As academics, we are trained to find the weaknesses in everything; in many ways, our security depends on our ability to identify weaknesses and develop new methods or solutions to address them. But I think it is important, too, to realize what the weaknesses are. For me, this is the reflective aspect of action research. While we may not be able to solve every problem, it is important to understand what the problem is. Uncovering weaknesses is the only path to developing solutions, even if no solution seems feasible. This feeds into the idea that action research is “a rolling discourse, an ongoing dialectical cycle…and it will always be provisional, always challenged by new experiences that alter prior results of the sense-making efforts” (Greenwood & Levin, 2007, p. 103). Exposing weaknesses (as well as exposing strengths) is essential to the knowledge-making process.
3. Second-Order Learning is Important. Second order learning, or learning about the learning process, is perhaps where I’ve spent the most time during this course, and I think action researchers in general need to be more aware of how second-order learning plays into the learning process. When we made this suggestion at the meeting, it was not warmly received. Either they thought they already knew about their organizational learning process or they didn’t see the importance. For our group, though, second-order learning was important. What made us unique in the class is that each of us came from a different discipline: public health, psychology, computer programming, and instructional technology. With these diverse backgrounds came diverse perspectives that had to be negotiated during the course of the study. Understanding and respecting each other really helped us work well together.

These are just some of my notes from this final meeting, but this post has gone on long enough (over 1000 words…yikes!), so I am going to take a break and pick up some more in a final reflection post in a couple of days. Until then!

S

Today I made my second trip to MOSI to collect data. I am focusing primarily on dwell times, as that was something D (our contact there) was very curious about. After a visitor or group is done with the exhibits we are looking at, I introduce myself as a researcher from USF and ask them what they got out of the exhibit and what they generally think about it. This latter question generates a number of different types of responses from affective reactions to suggestions for improvement.

During today’s visit I had several conversations with visitors, one in particular made me question the role of the researcher in action research. We’ve talked in class a lot about action research affecting change and I’ve kind of struggled with this idea in our particular project. Despite doing a thorough job of searching as described by Greenwood & Levin (2007), there still seems to be a question of how the data we gather will be used. Much of the purpose of MOSI is to inform the public about science (and the full scope thereof), and D indicated that a priority for him was understanding whether visitors were making lifestyle changes as a result of their visits to MOSI. Our group thought about this question for a while and wanted to attempt to answer it, but the question in itself is nearly impossible to answer: how exactly do you find out if someone changed some behavior based on exhibit they saw at MOSI?

Ultimately, we decided to steer away from this question since it would be impossible to address in the 8-10 week timeframe we have to work on this project. Instead, we decided to look at how people use the exhibits, and in case you’re wondering where this rambling post is going, I am now returning back to one of the conversations I had at MOSI today.

I was observing visitors as they used a drunk driving exhibit using the method described above. One man was visiting with his son and they used the exhibit together. When they were finished, I asked the father what he thought about the exhibit. He replied that it was “good for a wake up call for people who drive drunk.” I asked him if he explained the exhibit to his son, who was about 9, and if he thought it was important to talk with his son about it. He kind of wavered and said “well, yes, I told him it was about drinking and driving.” I thanked him and told him to enjoy the rest of his visit. As I turned to leave he continued, “Well, I think I will talk to him more about that when we get home.” I smiled. To me, two things happened here. First, the conversation between the father and me caused the father to consider the issue of drunk driving beyond the exhibit in the museum. If I had not asked this father about the exhibit, perhaps the two would have left and not given the exhibit a second thought. In this case, perhaps, my questioning led to a conversation about the dangers of drinking and driving between a father and his son, precisely the result our MOSI contact, D, hoped his exhibits inspired.

The important question, then, is whether the exhibit itself can inspire that conversation or whether there needs to be a third party involved to help the visitors really consider what interactions they are participating in and why. MOSI has interactors that are supposed to have these interactions, but I’m not exactly sure how the interactions are set up and enacted. I suppose I’ll have to look at this a little more.

S