7.2 Adolescent Explorations and Understandings of Local Environments First, “how do adolescents seek to explore and understand the local environment in which they find themselves?” In the panorama-to-map exercise which was part of the pre- and post-tests, participants were tasked to orientate a QuickTime VR panoramic scene of one of various locations in Singapore such that it matched the orientation of a map of the same area. Informal observations of how they went about doing so revealed that most would initially pan around the scene (usually in one direction) as they looked for features which drew their attention. They would then try to locate these features on the map.
A few participants (between approximately five- to ten-percent of the total population sampled – although no formal measures were taken in this regard) were so absorbed in examining the details in the panorama that they neglected to pan the full 360 degrees, thereby potentially missing out valuable clues. Conversely, only a similarly small proportion would begin with an overall pan of the full 360 degrees to establish spatial context. This might be because for many participants, the primary experience with exploring a panoramic image would be from first-person-shooter video games. In these games – such as ‘Command and Conquer’, ‘Doom’ and ‘Halo’ – the protagonist needs to defend himself or herself from opponents within the immediate field-of-vision – games are seldom designed such that the protagonist can be attacked without warning from behind; instead computer-generated opponents only take hostile action when they come into the protagonist’s field-of-vision. Such cultural baggage needs to be borne in mind in the design of learning tasks which involve the exploration of panoramically-rendered environments, such as those which are possible using the Unreal Tournament game engine (see for example, Good and Robertson (2004) on the use of the Neverwinter Nights toolset by adolescents) and, more recently, Google Earth.
Participants were also made aware of the zoom capabilities of the panorama-viewing software. Among those who used this function, the vast majority did so while not panning. That is to say, only one participant was comfortable zooming and panning at the same time (as an aside, his geography teacher had the following to say about him: “though he likes geography, he is an average student in the subject, his love is in mathematics” (Suen, personal communication, August 30, 2005)). For a few participants, the zoom became more of a hindrance than a help, because once they zoomed in to examine a detail, they neglected to zoom out again when panning, thus resulting in the participants’ missing of other clues.
The details in the panoramas that were often used to establish orientation were buildings and linear conduits / axial lines (such as rivers, canals and roads). Parks and open vegetated areas were less helpful. These observations are corroborated by Table 26, in which twenty-eight percent of the symbols communicated by the two teams described in Chapter Five comprised such axial lines, and a further twenty-two percent were buildings. That is to say, exactly half of the symbols in the environment that the members of the two teams found geographically helpful in conveying route information to each other, were either axial lines or buildings (as opposed to free-standing objects, transport nodes, or other major land uses). This is consistent with the literature (for example, Jul, 2001) which suggests that landmarks are not necessarily the most prominent or the largest structures in the vista space, but instead are those which the individual finds most meaningful. More recently, Dalton and Bafna (2003), in their critique of Lynch (1960), have suggested that mental maps are essentially structured by nodes and paths, and then elaborated or refined by a consideration of edges and landmarks. The panorama task afforded a convenient way of investigating this notion further, in a virtual setting.
Some of the panoramas used in the pre- and post-tests included prominent landmarks in Singapore, such as the Merlion, the Padang, and the War Memorial. Recognition of these landmarks varied among participants – the recognition rate was higher for those landmarks more explicitly associated with the tourist industry than with Singapore’s historical heritage. Finally, while all participants used prominent features of some form or other to help them with their orientation, few explicitly mentioned the relative proximal differences between the features as being useful.
It would seem from the above, and from the trend that during the Structured Academic Controversy task participants tended to focus on photographic evidence to do with environmental health and pollution, regardless of the actual topic under consideration, that there is a certain patchiness in how adolescents in Singapore view and perceive their local environments. Their relative familiarity with issues to do with the promotion of tourism and with the maintenance of a clean living environment stand in contrast to their knowledge of other aspects of Singapore’s heritage, as well as with wider issues of national development and land-use management, such as strategies to attract foreign investment and resource-sustainability.
Such biases are corroborated by Kong (1999, 2000), who has argued that children and adolescents in highly-urbanised Singapore view nature as something which is orderly and well-maintained. She continues that this rather limited perception arises from the fact that nature is "a ‘waste of time’. All the teenage members of the school group acknowledged that nature was not very much a part of their consciousness. When bored and thinking about places to visit and what things to do, the tendency was not to think of activities associated with nature. When thoughts about the natural world did surface in their minds, it was often in the context of school work, for example, their geography lessons, during which nature was more about conceptual issues and scientific processes than everday environments of potential fun and enjoyment" (Kong, 1999:3).
For an example of how this functional-positivist view of nature is reinforced within the formal schooling curriculum, one need look no further than one of the geography texts approved for use by Singapore’s Ministry of Education at the grade level appropriate to the participants in this study. Its chapter on the environment – which is revealingly titled ‘Environmental Management’ – opens with “the environment is very important to our survival and well-being” (Lin, 2001). It continues with “people need to learn to properly manage the environment and its resources” [emphasis added]. The chapter ends with a brief discussion on the Singapore Green Plan, which was introduced in 1992 with its stated aim of “building a sustainable environment for generations to come” (Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources, Singapore, 2006). The chapter in the textbook concludes: "the Singapore government knows that without proper management, problems of pollution and degradation could result. Thus, the Singapore Green Plan is continually being reviewed to ensure that our natural environment remains clean and green" [emphasis added]. (p. 56)
With such explicit emphases in their geography textbooks, it should not be at all surprising that the participants in the study structured their conversations around the maintenance of a clean living environment, even when such issues were peripheral at best to their assigned topic of debate.
With regards the differential influences of social mediations vis-à-vis spatial mediations, such patchiness of knowledge suggests the heavier weightage accorded by novices to fellow operators within their ZPD, as opposed to non-social environmental influences. On the other hand, it could also be argued that the patchiness of knowledge reflects the fact that the participants had not yet covered the entire geography syllabus.
Less in dispute would be that geography teachers might do well to bear in mind the tendency in many students to miss the wood for the trees, when analysing a map. The propensity for many participants in this study first not to have an overview scan of the entire panorama during the panorama-to-map exercise, and second to elect instead for a micro-level examination of details, sometimes at the expense of the given time limit, should be something for teachers of map-skills to bear in mind.
Analyses of the pre- and post-test results would also seem to bear out the merits of using intermediary forms of three-dimensional representation (such as QuickTime VR panoramas) as a bridge, during map-skills lessons, between students’ (actual or imagined) perceptions of real-world environments and traditional Euclidean topographic maps. Although this finding corroborates the work of the Virtual Field Course (the joint project by the University of London, Leicester University, and Oxford Brookes University) mentioned earlier in this chapter, it is still worth highlighting at this juncture as QuickTime VR panoramas and Google Earth tours are relatively cheap and easy to produce and localize, as opposed to more proprietary, higher-end solutions.
Teachers of geography might also note that, at least for adolescents in highly-urbanized Singapore, a comparison of Cases One and Two suggests that the features which students find meaningful in local environments when trying to establish orientation within them, are not necessarily visually prominent land-uses. Instead, they tend to be buildings and axial lines, as opposed to medium-scale land-uses such as parks and open vegetated areas. Again, this is consistent with the literature (Jul, 2001).
Second, these same adolescents revealed gaps in their knowledge about their country’s so-called significant landmarks, which tend more towards the tourist trade and away from her cultural and historical heritage. Even so, Case Three bears two learning points for instructional designers regarding pre- and mis-conceptions and surface learning: first, that photographs and other sources of information are open to multiple interpretations depending on what learners themselves bring to the table.
The other learning point from Case Three is that, with respect to the analysis of maps in particular, teachers of geography should not take for granted even the most basic precepts in map-reading skills which students might be reasonably expected to have. This is especially so in the light of work done by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986), which suggests that as geographical expertise is developed, teachers are sometimes less able to articulate the reasons for their understanding of a situation, and for their solutions to problems.
Case Three reminds geography teachers that the pre-conceptions and mis-conceptions that students have, can interfere with their successful operation within a socially-mediated ZPD. In other words, we would do well to bear in mind the implicit role played by spatial relations and visualizations in mediating cognition, even in a socially-idealized learning environment. Indeed, Wells expressed a similar caveat, which has taken on added significance in light of the earlier discussion on the logical-positivist tone adopted by geography texts in Singapore. In his paper ‘the Role of Dialogue in Activity Theory’, he wrote: "the reason for this variation [in schooling] is found in the unpredictable nature and outcome of any interaction that is co-constructed. Even with the most rigid teacher and the most passive and submissive students, there is no certainty about how the interaction between them will unfold nor about what meanings will be constructed. Nevertheless, to ensure that the same outcome should be achieved by all students in all comparable classrooms, schooling has been regularized by the creation of ‘grade-level-specific textbooks’ that function as the principal means of homogenized curriculum delivery" (Wells, 2002: 44).
Even among those who understood that maps could be rotated ‘upside down’, there were many participants in the study who were fixated by micro-level details in the given panoramic scenes (such as block numbers and street signs) without necessarily realizing that such details would often not be displayed on a map in the first place. In other words, participants had difficulty establishing an appropriate sense of scale when examining a map.
<- 7.1 Overview of Design & Summary of Primary Findings -> 7.3 Adolescent Communication of Environmental Understanding |
