3.2.4 Perspectives task

The perspectives task was the converse of the orienteering task.  By stipulating a highly structured format for debate (the Structured Academic Controversy), the perspectives task represented an attempt to hold constant the nature of discourse, thereby permitting examination of the ‘meaningful landmarks’ variable instead.  That is to say, the perspectives task represented an attempt to answer the question “what do adolescents find geographically meaningful in their local environment?”  The perspectives task sought to do this by requiring students to adopt and defend non-congruent social perspectives about a given neighbourhood.

Defined as the “deliberate stimulation of intellectual conflict by creating a highly structured situation wherein one student’s ideas, information, conclusions, theories, and opinions are incompatible with those of another, and the two seek to reach an agreement by engaging in Aristotlean ‘deliberate discourse’” (Johnson, Johnson and Smith (1997: 22)), Structured Academic Controversies permit investigations of the social distribution of intelligence, by building on traditional models of debate and encouraging participants to reach shared consensual values.

The study sought to apply the principles behind the design of Structured Academic Controversies – namely, turn-taking, mutual co-dependence, perspective-reversal and consensus-building – to learning environments in which the protagonists were not necessarily co-located.  In this way, personal understandings about space and place would evolve not only as individual participants explored the study areas, but also through the interaction with their peers.

Typically the model followed the design below:

The perspectives task comprised the following steps:
•    For this task, each team was made up of two pairs of students.  Both teams were given a fixed duration of time (typically forty-five minutes) to explore a well-delineated area, with a view to gathering pictorial evidence to support a certain point-of-view.  Pairs of students from the same team were encouraged to share their findings with each other, via MMS;
•    For example, teams could have been tasked to investigate the extent to which a particular neighbourhood was meeting the needs of residents of public housing;
•    After the initial time-period was over, both teams were given an additional forty-five minutes to engage in a dialogue along the lines of a Structured Academic Controversy.  This dialogue did not take place through face-to-face interaction, but through an exchange of text- and picture-messaging, allowing the nature and modalities of the discourse to be easily archived for subsequent analysis.

It should be evident from the preceding description that once the students were sent on their explorations, it would not have been easy to manifest a strong teaching presence.  To some extent, this was ameliorated by conducting a thorough briefing (typically forty minutes in duration) with the students before the activity itself.  During the field activity itself, teaching presence was also exercised through the proxy of the chaperone who accompanied each pair of students.  Chaperones were instructed to ensure the safety of the students while in the field, as well as to provide troubleshooting assistance should any hardware problems were to have arisen.

It should also be noted that, with respect to the model of practical inquiry proposed by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2001) discussed in Chapter One, the various stages of the perspectives task correspond very well with the four parts of the model.  Specifically, the triggering event was represented by the explicit presentation of the topic of controversy to the students by the investigator.  The exploration stage in the practical inquiry model manifested itself through the exploration and initial presentation of the respective points-of-view of the students.  The integration stage took place when the students began to debate and reverse perspectives.  Finally the resolution stage was represented by the students’ attempts at building a consensus.

In the earlier description of the example, both teams are described to have been engaged in a dialogue regarding the needs of residents of public housing.  Other topics which students were given the opportunity to investigate included:
•    Discussion of the site and situation of a large convention centre / exhibition complex;
•    Evaluation of the tourism potential of a given neighbourhood;
•    Discussion of the tension between urban renewal and the preservation of cultural heritage;
•    Explorations of the compatibility of land-use around areas of scenic beauty or strategic importance; and
•    Projections of the extent to which the particular demographics of a given neighbourhood lent themselves to catalysing environmental activism.
These topics were chosen because they align themselves well with the themes of ‘development’, ‘environment’ and ‘tourism’, which are found in the present geography syllabus in schools in Singapore.

Once the students were back in class, a post-test was administered. The post-test was similar in task to the pre-test, and care was taken to ensure that tasks of the same level of difficulty as the pre-test were matched to each student.  Analyses of the results enabled the extent of the assumed contribution of multimedia-messaging to students’ powers of observation, cognitive mapping abilities and appreciation of multiple points-of-view to be determined. 
   
In addition, analyses of the reasons for deviation from prescribed routes, the time taken to navigate such routes, and the exchange of text- and picture-messages among students as they seek to navigate the routes, gave valuable insights into how teenagers seek to explore and understand their local environments, in addition to how such understandings of three-dimensional environments are communicated to their peers via the media of text, pictures and video.