Concept Mapping and Environment as Connection

What is environment? We follow recent scholarly literature in approaching environment as connection, not as some category of reality, and consider pedagogical implications via concept mapping. Concept maps potentially offer a visually explicit means of representing and analyzing the hybrid connections between actors that define environmental issues. We explore the utility of concept mapping as pioneered by Joseph Novak and others via the CmapTools application, in which concept maps (cmaps) consist of concepts (boxes or nouns) connected by propositions (arrows or verbs); both can include linked resources, and the resultant cmap can be collaboratively edited and shared online. We evaluate concept mapping in the context of a sophomorelevel environmental methods course taught annually at Lewis & Clark College. The course includes a variety of concept mapping exercises designed for students to reflect on their environmental perspectives, synthesize course material, and explore a proposed topic for environmental research. These exercises were evaluated in fall 2010 using self-reports, assessment rubrics, and openended student responses. Results showed that higher-achieving students generally found concept mapping more demanding and attained more sophisticated understandings of connections. This suggests that concept mapping helps facilitate the intellectual struggle that characterizes engaged learning; yet in a larger sense, the study illustrates challenges in cultivating new approaches to environment among undergraduate students. 1 Environment as connection 1.1 The environment of ESS As an interdiscipline, environmental studies and sciences (ESS) gathers a tremendous diversity of contributing fields, ranging from history and philosophy to economics and chemistry to sociology and ecology. What is shared across this broad spectrum is the term “environment.” But what is environment, and how shall practitioners of ESS develop approaches to learning so that their students effectively grasp and communicate this common thread? In this paper, we approach ESS from the premise of environment as connection, not a category. This approach is more etymologically true to the root of environment as, roughly, that which surrounds (Proctor 2009), and potentially affords fuller and more novel explorations of environmental issues by our students without importing too much baggage associated with concepts of nature. To us, the connections that comprise environment are not so much between some overgeneralized “human” and “nonhuman” or “natural” realms as between all the specific actors— lizards, laws, ocean currents, spiritual movements, structural adjustments—that come into relation in the context of what we have received as environmental issues, whether relatively longstanding (e.g., water pollution, wilderness) or more recent (e.g., endocrine disruption, environmental justice). There is no clear line separating environmental issues from other issues, which our definition of environment affirms; but there is plenty of good work to be done by practitioners of ESS to shed greater scholarly light on the issues we have inherited, primarily by elucidating the connections that matter in tracing issue-related problems and solutions. 1.2 Reframing environmental research Approaching environment as connection demands new analytical methodologies, as it generally approaches environmental problems and solutions more with a fine-tipped felt pen than a foot-wide paint roller. Gone—if the above critiques of environment are at all valid—are the easy truths of listening to nature, going green, or caring for the earth. There are no a priori problems and villains, no a priori solutions and heroes. What replaces these shortcuts is educationally rich: a more open-ended focus on connecting the details that matter in a given environmental issue; a valorization of curiosity and careful research; and a sense that there is still much of value to be contributed by the current and future ESS community. Approaching environment as connection and not just a category of nonhuman stuff also challenges notions of cause and effect fundamental to our understanding of environmental issues. Far too often, the nonhuman realm has been understood as a passive recipient of human injury, thus leading to the curious conclusion (sometimes celebrated in “green” product advertisements) that the ideal human impact is to have none at all. If, however, environmental reality is understood as fundamentally entangled, notions of cause and effect become 1 See e.g. noimpactproject.org. more complex and interesting, and environmental solutions encompass change—or resistance to change—in a host of related human and nonhuman actors. Ultimately, ESS research can remind us that though—as Barry Commoner reminded us (1971)—everything is indeed connected to everything else, some connections are more significant, some are better understood, some are more tractable to change...in short, certain connections matter more than others. Discovering, explaining, and elucidating these special connections becomes the value added to contemporary discourse on environmental issues via ESS scholarship. 2 Connecting via concept mapping 2.1 Concept mapping and related approaches With the advent of web2.0 interactive tools, a host of possibilities arises for ESS instructors interested in helping their students explore environmental connections. Some of these offer web-based simulation: one example is climateinteractive.org, an online climate simulation community serving users ranging from high school to government. Another class of web2.0 social bookmarking tools (e.g., Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Diigo) provides for readily connecting online resources by allowing users to store, aggregate, share, rate, and comment on anything they find online. A final class of web2.0 interactive tools deserves greater attention, as it very closely resembles concept mapping: this is what is generally known as mind mapping. Mind maps are hierarchical, generally starting with a core idea in the center of the map, then branching in treelike fashion out to subcategories. In this regard, mind maps reproduce a typical text outline structure, and in fact text outlines can be exported for visual display as mind maps. A wide variety of desktop and online mind mapping tools is currently available, some of which allow for online collaboration and presentation. Some (not all) mind mapping tools allow for resources (hyperlinks, documents, notes, etc.) to be added to components, and some (not all) allow for nonhierarchical connections to be drawn between components. For all, however, the user interface is optimized for tree-like hierarchical entry of elements at either a parallel level in the hierarchical structure, or a lower level. Concept mapping is similar in many ways to the more ubiquitous mind mapping, with one crucial difference: concept maps are not necessarily hierarchical in structure. The difference proves fundamental when one wishes to use these tools to help students explore connections. If ESS were approached as a multidiscipline, hierarchical mapping may in many ways be sufficient, as each contributing field (and related system, e.g., hydrology or politics or culture) could be viewed as offering its relatively distinct perspective on an environmental issue. Approached as a mind map, an environmental issue would be the core idea, then each contributing field would define a first-level subcategory, with its attendant details under that subcategory. All contributing fields would be related in the context of this environmental issue, but only contingently so: there would be no significant connections outside of this root-level connection to the issue. In approaching environment as connection, however, hybrids and heterogeneity tend to be the norm, where surprising and persistent entanglements of politics and climate, or culture and charismatic species, or economics and energy, challenge any hope of separating constituent processes. This, to the interdisciplinary ESS practitioner, is the reality to be analyzed, with connections that are often more necessary than contingent: the current climate system, or state of charismatic megafauna, or rate of alternative energy development, are necessarily entangled with issues of politics, culture, and economics. These relations are, for the most part, nonhierarchical, as the overall set of interactions is more of a diffuse network than a hierarchy. This is why, no matter what sort of tool or pedagogical approach is employed, care must be taken to allow for nonhierarchical as well as hierarchical relations in mapping out connections in ESS. In a similar vein, Kinchin (2001) argues that appreciation of nonhierarchical connections—what he calls a “net” concept map—generally suggests a more complex student understanding of biological processes than simple hierarchies, which he calls a “spoke” concept map. Though the above suggests that concept mapping was developed as an alternative to hierarchical mind mapping, the most commonly cited origins of these two approaches suggest otherwise. Mind mapping is generally attributed to the work of educational consultant Tony Buzan dating from the 1970s, whereas concept mapping is attributed to Joseph Novak dating from the same period (Novak and Cañas 2008), and in much of his work Novak recommends building concept maps hierarchically—by which he appears to mean a flow of 2 See for instance www.mindmeister.com, www.mindnode.com, www.mindomo.com, www.thinkbuzan.com. 3 See www.thinkbuzan.com. ideas from general to specific, though not necessarily a strict tree-like hierarchy as in mind mapping. Yet CmapTools, the concept mapping tool Novak helped develop and the one we have utilized at Lewis & Clark College, can be deployed to build any sort of diagram, so we do not necessarily follow Novak’s recommendation, especially in what we call process concept maps below. As elaborated by Novak and others, concept mapping has strong roots in educational theory and is regularly deployed in classrooms worldwide. Novak originally designed concept mapping as a means of evaluating student achievement in the sciences. He was strongly influenced by the work of psychologist David Ausubel, whose theory of cognitive learning proposes that students do not simply assimilate new information, but rather connect and integrate it into their pre-existing mental structure (Ausubel 1963). Novak aspired for concept mapping to facilitate Ausubel’s notion that truly meaningful learning occurs when students are motivated, clearly comprehend root concepts, and find meaning and relevance in the new material. According to this theory, education is not a cognitive, one-directional model of information assimilation, but rather the significance of the student’s individual learning experience is critical to the learning process. Says Novak, “The central purpose of education is to empower learners to take charge of their own meaning making...involving thinking, feeling, and acting, and all three of these aspects must be integrated for significant new learning” (Novak 2010, 13). From an assessment perspective, this necessitates scoring concept maps for more than just “correctness,” attending to each map’s individual morphology (Kinchin 2001)—though others have attempted to create more generalized normative rubrics for “good” concept maps (Moon et al. 2011a). 2.2 Concept mapping and environmental studies at Lewis & Clark Concept mapping has been applied in a variety of educational and corporate settings, including cases related to ESS such as national parks (O'Brien 2002), grassland management (White 2011), and ecosystem services (Yee et al. 2011). Given the flexibility of the concept mapping approach and its potential relevance to environmental analysis, the Environmental Studies (ENVS) Program at Lewis & Clark College introduced concept mapping into its curriculum as a visual tool to more clearly specify connections in environmental processes. To aid this approach, we have developed online documentation to guide students in use of the technology. Students use the CmapTools application to develop their concept maps (cmaps). We selected this application as it is freely available for a variety of platforms, well maintained, and easy for our students to learn. In CmapTools, concept maps consist of concepts (boxes or “nouns”) and linking propositions (lines or “verbs” defining associations); CmapTools-based concept maps are thus designed not only as visualizations, but as structured textual descriptions of processes. One special CmapTools feature our students utilize involves its ability to associate concepts or propositions with resources such as documents, references, or websites, which are simply dragged onto the cmap; these resources, for instance, can be used to justify, or summarize the state of knowledge on, a connection. Another feature students use involves a CmapTools server, whereby they readily save and edit their cmaps in a cloud environment, providing opportunities for live collaboration. In addition, all cmaps saved on the server are immediately rendered into viewable images for web visualization. thus affords a means of reinforcing an approach to environment as connection, and offers a social learning approach for students to work together and compare their efforts. When we originally introduced concept mapping into our ENVS Program, we gave students a great deal of latitude in how to use it. Their early forays proved useful toward refining our pedagogical approach, as in many ways this laissez-faire approach promoted as much frustration and muddled thinking as clarity in analysis among students. Two challenges arose in particular: first, students tended toward inclusion of overly broad concepts and propositions, such as identifying “population growth,” “climate change,” or “capitalism” as key drivers of environmental processes. Concepts or propositions at this level of generality may be helpful for preliminary work, but typically do not afford the more nuanced understandings we seek among our students. Second, students would generally include a large number of concepts and propositions, such that their resultant concept maps complexified rather than clarified environmental processes. We eventually realized that overly broad concept map elements, and overly complex concept maps, are understandable and useful in early stages of student thinking about an environmental process, yet devised a 4 The hierarchical nature of Novak-inspired concept maps also seems to be interpreted differently by those who have applied this approach in a variety of practical settings; see Moon et al. (2011b). 5 See http://cmap.ihmc.us. 6 As one estimate, the CmapTools server network includes over 150 publicly available servers distributed across the globe; see http://cmapdp.ihmc.us/servlet/HtmlViewServlet?viewhtml. 7 See http://sge.lclark.edu/social-learning-tools/#Concept_Mapping. contrasting later-stage approach built on actor-network theory (ANT) to address these limitations. ANT has been well documented elsewhere (e.g., Latour 2007; Law and Hassard 1999): as applied to environmental processes (e.g., Castree 2002), it reinforces a more hybrid and fluid notion of environment as unfolding connections. Actor-networks map readily onto our use of concept maps, and ANT theory addresses the two student challenges noted above, in that actors-networks are ideally specific and concrete, and given the implicit notion underlying actor-networks that some connections matter more than others. These ANT principles have led students to work toward concept maps—and thus understanding and communication of connections in environmental processes—that are clearer and more forceful. Our resultant approach to student concept mapping thus progresses in multiple phases, from relatively rough, general, and complicated initial concept maps to relatively refined, specific, and elegant concept maps including related resources. We also have realized that concept maps can be applied toward two different sorts of needs. The first concerns clarification of ideas, which we call “perspectives” concept maps. Students create perspectives concept maps, for instance, to clarify ideas presented in a reading, or to draw together material learned in a class. The second concerns clarification of processes occurring in the world, which we call “process” concept maps. Process concept maps are designed in ANT fashion to represent networks of associations between a wide array of biological, technological, legal, and other actors. These initial and refined concept maps, and perspectives and process concept maps, were all implemented in the course we will analyze below. 3 Learning concept mapping at Lewis & Clark College