Description:

An Experiment with the Project Method: Investigating Structured-Choice Learning in a STEAM Lab

Researchers and educators have argued that productive learning may occur when young people have freedom to organize their activity based on their own interests and concerns. Schools increasingly provide environments that allow students to design and build objects and technical devices of their choosing, and researchers have developed in-school programs that provide students with a set of curated options among technology, engineering, and design activities. Little is known empirically, however, about such environments: how young people learn when given the ability to decide and organize their activity, how districts establish and sustain choice-based environments, and how teachers organize and support them.

In this dissertation, I explore these questions through an investigation of the STEAM Lab at Eagle Lake Middle School. As a conceptual framework, I describe a conflict between scientific essentialist and humanistic conceptions of teaching and learning. I show that these instructional logics, which had come into conflict historically at Eagle Lake, were being negotiated by modern-day teachers and administrators. Drawing on 6 months of ethnography in the STEAM Lab, I describe the student learning process under conditions of structured choice, using grounded theoretical methods to develop a process model I call constructive interaction. I then present the case of a 7th grader named Kira. Troubled in school, Kira found a home in the STEAM Lab, acquiring sophisticated technical skills, becoming a skilled instructor for her peers, and discovering a potential future identity as a creative professional.

I show that Kira was ultimately harmed, however, by Eagle Lake’s struggle to reconcile the competing instructional logics in the STEAM Lab through an assessment and grading rubric. I discuss alternative options for documenting student achievement in the STEAM Lab. This work may provide guidance for schools and districts seeking an appropriate balance of interests as they develop learning environments that provide increased freedom and choice to young people