how could the dinosaurs be so close to the future? : how

ARTICLE

‘How Could the Dinosaurs Be So Close to the Future?’: How NaturalHistory Museum Educators Tackle Deep TimeMARIJKE HECHT , KAREN KNUTSON, KEVIN CROWLEY, MANDELA LYON, PATRICK MCSHEA, AND LAUREN GIARRATANI

Abstract Natural history museums play an important role in engaging the public in critical conversationsabout science and society. However, understanding complex concepts such as the Anthropocene requiresthinking at large spatial and temporal scales. This challenge is at the forefront of a research-practicepartnership between the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (Museum) and the University of PittsburghCenter for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE). Together we designed a tool to helpmuseum educators engage visitors in conceptualizing and connecting deep time with pressingenvironmental concerns. We observed educators using the tool in two settings: summer camp and on theMuseum floor. We then interviewed educators to understand how they frame learning goals forunderstanding deep time and how their strategies support learner connections to the Anthropocene. Whilethe tool was generally well received by educators, our observations and interviews also revealed twofundamental tensions. One tension was in pedagogical approaches – either inquiry or transmission – and theother was in learning goals – either wonder or relativity. Going forward, the Museum plans to use the toolboth for exploration of deep time and as a professional development tool for Museum educators to betterbalance their use of these different approaches.

INTRODUCTION

Natural history museums play an importantrole in engaging the public in critical conversa-tions about science and society in the 21st cen-tury (Watson and Werb, 2013). Humanity’sincreasing influence on earth systems is evidentin everything from ubiquitous plastics toincreasing atmospheric carbon (Steffen, Broad-gate, Deutsch, Gaffney, and Ludwig, 2015).These influences are expected to make a lastingmark in the earth’s geology, marking the begin-ning of whatmany are calling the Anthropocene

(Waters et al., 2016). Natural history museumscan build the public’s knowledge about human-ity’s impact on these changing earth systems.Their unique combination of historic and on-going scientific collections, paired with robustpublic education programs, position natural his-tory museums as critical leaders for engagingthe public in tough Anthropocene issues such asclimate change (Dorfman, 2018).

However, understanding complex conceptssuch as the Anthropocene requires thinking atlarge spatial and temporal scales. Implementingeducational activities that support scalar

Marijke Hecht ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate in Learning Sciences & Policy in the School of Education atthe University of Pittsburgh. Karen Knutson ([email protected]) is Assistant Director of the University of Pitts-burgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments. Kevin Crowley ([email protected]) is Professor ofLearning Sciences & Policy in the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh and a Senior Scientist atthe Learning Research & Development Center. Mandela Lyon ([email protected]) is a Program Managerin the Education Department at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Patrick McShea ([email protected]) is a Program Officer in the Education Department at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Lau-ren Giarratani ([email protected]) is the Director of Education at Carnegie Museum of NaturalHistory.

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thinking for visitors is a persistent problem ofpractice for museum educators (Wormald,2017). Teaching the public about dinosaurs,typically the most popular attraction for manynatural history museums, immediately surfacesthe challenge that educators have of presentingconcepts related to geologic time scale, or deeptime. The need to impact public thinking aboutissues at large scale becomes even more pro-nounced when museums work to illuminate theAnthropocene. This paper, which is the productof ongoing research-practice partnership workbetween the University of Pittsburgh Center forLearning in Out-of-School Environments(UPCLOSE) and the Carnegie Museum ofNatural History (Museum), describes how weworked in partnership to tackle this problem ofpractice by codesigning a simple tool for educa-tors to use when discussing deep time withmuseum visitors. We focus here on researcherobservation of, and practitioner self-reflectionon, pedagogical practices in two settings: on themuseum floor and in a summer camp.

The Museum has adopted a strong focuson bringing concepts of the Anthropocene toits visitors. In 2018, the Museum hired anecologist and climate scientist to become theCurator of the Anthropocene, the first positionof this kind internationally. That same year,they featured a 10-month exhibit entitled, ‘WeAre Nature: Living in the Anthropocene’(Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 2018).The exhibit exemplifies the significance of deeptime for understanding the Anthropocene. Forexample, the exhibit relied on museum visitors’ability to conceptualize large temporal and spa-tial scalar shifts. When visitors first entered theexhibit, they were greeted with signage thatread:

‘What the heck is the Anthropocene? The

Anthropocene is a newly proposed epoch, or

geological time period, defined by humans’

effect on the environment.’

This immediate reference to a ‘geologictime period’ was intended to position visitors tothink about the vast temporal scale of deep timeas a core environmental concept.

Visitors were also expected to make spatialscalar jumps to consider environmental systemsat the scale of the entire planet. As they roundedthe corner, visitors were confronted with agraph covering a large wall of the exhibit. Thegraph depicted the twin phenomena of sharplyrising population and atmospheric carbon diox-ide beginning in the middle of the 20th century(See Figure 1). These deceptively simple butengaging visuals demanded that visitors think atboth the spatial scale of the entire earth and thetemporal scale of geologic time. While both aredifficult, spatial scalar shifts can be supportedthrough the use of modern tools and technolo-gies, such as satellite images that allow us tovisualize the entirety of the planet. But theconcept of deep time is much more difficult toillustrate and notoriously hard to learn (Trus-cott, Boyle, Burkill, Libarkin, and Lonsdale,2013).

We don’t have any technological tools tohelp our senses make a temporal scalar jump.Temporal scalar understanding is inherentlydifficult because it requires abstract, conceptualthinking (Jones and Taylor, 2009; Resnick,Davatzes, Newcombe, and Shipley, 2017).Given the complex and abstract nature of deeptime, it is possible that an educator could intro-duce the concept of deep time to a museum visi-tor, but the visitor might not bring thisinformation to bear as a resource when con-fronted with the concept of the Anthropocene.For example, we might imagine a visitor beingpresented with a piece of shale rock from thePennsylvanian period by a docent and being told

2 Article: Natural History Museum Educators Tackle Deep Time

CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL

that it is 300 million years old. The visitor maynote this information with a nod, but they maystill not understand how mind-bogglingly big300 million years is, nor be able to connect thisfact with the idea that plastiglomerate (an arti-fact of the Anthropocene) may be present 300million years into the future.

Given that the ability to think across sys-tems and scale is an essential element for under-standing contemporary environmental issues(Tewksbury et al., 2014), and that Museumeducators struggle with this topic, we broughtthis challenge to the forefront of our research-practice partnership (RPP), which brings learn-ing science research to bear on Museum prac-tices (Steiner and Crowley, 2013). Some of ourprevious RPP work has focused on the role ofreflective practice for docent professional

development (Allen and Crowley, 2014) as wellas the need for theMuseum to have flexible, lowcost, educational tools that can be rapidly testedand improved (Knutson et al., 2016; Hechtet al., 2019). The current project is an extensionof these prior efforts and brings together a teammade up of Museum educators, Museum scien-tists, and university-based learning researchers.

Based on conversations within the teamabout the significance of systems and scale forunderstanding the Anthropocene, we endeav-ored to develop a concrete tool to help educa-tors support the conceptualization of temporalscales that extend beyond human senses. Ourtool was designed for educators to betterengage visitors in this difficult conceptual ideaand help to connect deep time with pressingenvironmental concerns. The Museum’s

Figure 1. Image of the We are Nature exhibit graph depicting rising population and atmospheric carbon dioxide.(Photo credit: Joshua Franzos/CMNH).

Marijke Hecht, Karen Knutson, Kevin Crowley, Mandela Lyon, Patrick McShea, and Lauren Giarratani 3

educators have previously used various interac-tive tools to explain deep time. For this project,we wanted to extend the ways in whichMuseum educators approach deep time andsee if we could create some new, low-tech toolsthat they could use in various program settings.We hoped to evoke both wonder in theexpanse of deep time and context for buildingknowledge about deep time.

Museum educators indicated that they havepreviously used several approaches to exploringdeep time, including presenting all of the earth’shistory as a clock, where modern humans do notappear until 11:59, as well as asking learners toconsider the length of their arm as the entiretyof the planet’s history. These types of analogousmodels are commonly used in both formaland informal settings. In addition to two-dimensional visual depictions of deep time (e.g.,the Geological Society of America’s geologictime scale), there have been a number of otherhands-on educational efforts to explore deeptime including field experiences that examinerock strata (Zen, 1995), geologic-themed puz-zles used to explore student understanding(Dodick and Orion, 2003), and linear modelswhich include both large scale walkable exhi-bits, e.g. at the Grand Canyon (Karlstrom et al.,2008; Semken et al., 2009) and smaller scaledepictions, e.g. using ropes (Richardson, 2005)or toilet paper (Wenner, 2018).

The tool we developed – a rope wrappedon a reel – was a linear depiction of deep timewhich was labeled to indicate calibrated geo-logical time intervals. The Rope includedmarkers with significant events in the earth’shistory and was based on other educationalexamples of linear depictions of deep time. Wesought to develop a tangible object that com-bined visualization and interaction in order toafford learners the opportunity to engage withthis complex and conceptual material (Block,

Horn, and Phillips, 2012; Horn, 2018).Although the term tangible objects is sometimesequated with computational objects (Hor-necker, 2011), here we focus on non-digitalobjects that present unique affordances formuseum educators working to supportmuseum visitors as they grapple with complexideas of natural history, such as evolution(Horn, 2013) and deep time.

Our approach, which is similar to other lin-ear depictions (Richardson, 2005; Wenner,2018) had several affordances and it could besimple, both in construction and interpretation.This built off previous research-practice part-nership work between the Museum andUPCLOSE that surfaced the value of concreteand simple objects for public audiences toengage with abstractions such as climate change(Steiner, 2016). It was also physically appropri-ate for the Museum setting and could easily beused in both classroom and Museum floor set-tings. The tool was also designed so that itwould be useful for educators working withMuseum visitors of a variety of ages.

After co-designing the Rope withMuseumeducators, we observed educators using the toolin two settings – summer camp and on theMuseum floor. We then interviewed educatorsto understand how they conceptualized thechallenges of conveying temporal ideas to thepublic and if they were able to explicitly addresssome of the challenges of scale in relation to theAnthropocene.

Our research questions were:

1. How doMuseum educators, when con-sidering the tangible object, frame theirlearning goals for understanding deeptime?

2. What strategies doMuseum educatorsuse to engage learners in thinking about



deep time in the presence of the tangibleobject?

3. How do educator strategies and goalswith respect to the tangible object sup-port learner connections to theAnthro-pocene?

IMPLEMENTATION

Developing The Rope

TomeetMuseum educators’ needs, we cre-ated a rope that was portable, simple and cheapto construct, and flexible enough to be inter-preted differently for different ages. It could beunwound to reveal important events in geologi-cal time that occurred between the formation ofEarth (4.6 billion years ago) and the present.Our hope was to create a tool that models thevastness of the history of the Earth and givesvisitors a sense of awe for the relatively smallamount of time that humans have been on theplanet. Ideally, the Rope would help learnersconceptualize humanity’s position in deep timeand also give some context for how significant itis for humans to be making a permanent shift inthe stratigraphy with the rise of the Anthro-pocene.

First, we built several prototypes and itera-tively refined these with educators. We initiallyused a 50-foot rope, an electrical cord storagereel (for winding and storing), and markersmade out of felt indicating major events in geo-logic time (see appendix for list of events). Wechose to divide the major events into three con-ceptual categories: geologic events (e.g. eras,epochs), abiotic events (e.g. oxygenation of theEarth’s atmosphere) and biotic events (e.g. therise of dinosaurs). We marked the Rope at 100million year increments every 1-foot (indicated

by red tape) and billion year increments every10-foot (indicated by black tape).

We introduced the prototype at a workshopfor educators in the Museum’s network. Theworkshop included 24 educators, including K-12 art and science teachers and out-of-schooleducators. We asked educators to play with theRope and consider what might make it morefunctional for their use. Based on this feedbackwe made two major changes to the Rope. (1)We shortened the Rope length to 25-feet tobetter meet the physical constraints of manyindoor educational spaces (1 billion years = 5feet; 100 million years = 6 inches), and (2) wereversed the order of the event markers so thatthe first thing learners will see is the Earth’s for-mation 4.6 billion years ago; the Rope then hasto be unfurled to reveal the present day. Later,when several educators expressed a desire tohave learners try to make guesses about wherethe events belonged on the timeline before see-ing the known information, we made a thirdprototype of the Rope which had fewer eventsattached to the Rope. The remaining events,which did not include the dates, were written onloose pieces of felt that could be manipulated bylearners. We also made this version of the Rope30 feet long so that it could extend approxi-mately 1 billion years into the future in order toprovide a platform for future thinking, a topicthat docents wanted to explore in a summercamp program.

After the design of the Rope we wantedto better understand educator practices intwo of the Museum’s educational settings: (1)summer camps led by camp counselors and(2) on the Museum floor at activity stationsstaffed by docents. We chose these two set-tings because they are focal program areas forthe Museum’s education team that offered anopportunity to engage visitors in issues of theAnthropocene.


We conducted observations of educators’practices using the Rope in both camp andon the Museum floor. Ultimately, the educa-tors chose to use two of the ropes for theiractivities: the second prototype, which we callthe ‘key rope’ because it had the correct loca-tions for all event markers, and the third pro-totype, which we call the ‘simple rope’. Wefollowed the observations with educatorinterviews. After completing observations andinterviews, our research team did thematicanalysis of the data. For this, we identifiedpatterns in educator practices and then exam-ined those patterns through data visualizationthat allowed us to see how differentapproaches and learning goals may haverelated to one another (Miles, Huberman,and Salda~na, 2014).

Educator Practices on The Museum Floor

The Museum floor observation was partof what the docents call a ‘spotlight’ activity.During a spotlight activity, docents are atfixed locations on the Museum floor wherethey engage Museum visitors by encouragingthem to look more closely at objects fromthe Museum’s collection. For this activity,docents had the simple and key deep timeropes and some small Museum objects, whichthey call ‘touchables’, that related to the eventmarkers. The docents hung one of the deeptime ropes from a set of stanchions placedadjacent to the largest and most prominentof the dinosaur displays.

We observed two pairs of docents: onefor one and a half hours on a weekday; theother for two and a half hours on a weekendwhen spotlight activities are scheduled to runlonger. During these observations, educatorsengaged with 52 visitor groups that includedfamilies with children, mixed aged groups,

and adult groups. The docents spent variedamounts of time with visitors, ranging from1 to 19 minutes with an average amount oftime being approximately 6 minutes. Imme-diately following activity observations, weinterviewed the docent pairs about theirexperience.

Each of the two docent pairs elected touse slightly different configurations for theactivity. One docent pair displayed the simpleRope (with fewer event markers) on the stan-chions. They used the detailed key Rope(with more event markers) as an engagementtool for visitors as they passed, asking themif they would like to unfurl the Rope them-selves. The other docent pair chose a differ-ent configuration: they displayed the moredetailed key Rope and after some experimen-tation with asking visitors to unfurl the sim-ple Rope, this team found that people wereresistant to this, and they abandoned usingthe this Rope.

The hall also had a large wooden bench thatboth teams used to display touchable objectsfrom the Museum’s collection. This gaveMuseum visitors a chance to engage directlywith Museum objects and consider how theyrelated to the Rope and to deep time. Becausethe Museum allows for significant docentautonomy, each docent pair used a slightly dif-ferent set of touchable objects. One pair’s setincluded a stromatolite, a trilobite, a hunk ofbituminous coal, a cast of a dinosaur claw, and acast of an ancient Egyptian scarab. The otherpair also used the trilobite, the coal, the dinosaurclaw and scarab casts, as well as a cast of a fishfossil from the Museum’s collection. They sup-plemented these with additional objects thatone of the docents brought in from their per-sonal collection, which included a piece ofbanded iron, a different stromatolite, an ammo-nite, and amegalodon tooth.



Educator Practices in A Summer Camp

The Rope was also used in a weeklong sum-mer camp designed for 8–10-year olds, whichhad 17 attendees. We chose to work with thisparticular camp and counselor because the camphad explicit Anthropocene connections. Thecamp was called “Escape the Extinction” and itincluded activities for children to explore thecauses of previous extinctions and considerimplications for the future. The camp wasdesigned as an immersive role-playing game,where campers took on the role of detectivesbuilding a time machine and moving throughtime to solve themystery of a missing scientist.

We observed the counselors’ introductionof the Rope during a 1-hour activity on themorning of the first day of camp and inter-viewed the lead counselor immediately follow-ing the camp that afternoon. During the initialactivity, the counselor unfurled the simple Ropeand laid it across the floor of the Museum class-room. After some initial probing questions, shegave pairs of children 2–3 of the loose felt eventmarkers and had them work together for about10 minutes to make guesses about where theevents belonged along the Rope. She thenbrought the whole group together near themorerecent end of the timeline, where they gatheredclosely on the floor. She encouraged the cam-pers to explain and debate where the eventmarkers were placed. After this discussion, sheunfurled the key Rope next to the simple Ropeand asked the children to see how their ideascompared with scientific evidence. This led to alonger large group discussion about deep time.

At the conclusion of the activity, the campcounselor hung the key Rope up in the class-room and left it there throughout the week as areference for campers as they imaginativelymoved through time using their time machine.Later in the week the campers were also given

blank pieces of felt on which to add their ownideas about the deep future. We conducted asecond interview with the camp counselor afterthe last day of camp to learn about her impres-sions of the use of the Rope and deep timethroughout the week.

Educator Reflections on Learner Reactions

Overall, educators both in the camp and onthe Museum floor described learners as beingmore engaged in the Rope activity than in otherdeep time activities, such as the clock analogythat they had previously used. Docents reflectedon how much longer people participated in thisactivity compared both with other deep timeand other spotlight activities they had used inthe past. Amy, the camp counselor, alsoremarked on her surprise at how long the cam-pers were engaged (all names are pseudonyms).

I had planned I think like 30–45 minutes

for that lesson and it went over an hour on time,

so that was really exciting because they were just

engaged and why stop a good thing when it is

happening?

Educators also reflected on the value ofhaving a tangible object to represent deep time.One of the docents, Kelly, said, ‘‘I use the arm alot. And the arm works, but I like the timelinebetter. . .the Rope is longer, which I like.’ Here,we heard Kelly referring to the physical proper-ties of the Rope as a key aspect of what helpedmake it valuable for thinking about deep time.The length of the Rope was able to provide aphysical depiction of time that wasmuch greaterthan either an arm or a clock.

The Rope was long enough that learnerscould not see the entirety of the Rope from oneposition and were forced to walk along the Ropein order to move ‘forward’ or ‘backward’ in time.


This generated a lot of interest for the youngcampers, but also for many of the Museum visi-tors who made regular comments on the tangibleobject itself, saying things such as, ‘You know it,but it doesn’t really process until you see it likethat.’ Or as in this interpretation that a fathergave to his 5-year-old daughter as they walkedalong the Rope during a spotlight activity:

This whole thing is the whole earth. Keep

walking way further – come all the way down

here to where the dinosaurs are. Dinosaurs

didn’t even come around til down here. That’s

pretty crazy. We’re like a little blip on the map.

When we asked the educators to considerhow visitors connected the Rope to the Anthro-pocene, expression of fear and negative ideaswere common. Robert, a docent, noted:

I think, part of it is they get afraid.

Because they see these extinctions occurring

and they’re thinking ‘How much time are

humans going to be around?’ It’s kind of like

knowing your mortality – you know you’re

going to die, it just a matter of when it is

going to occur. They think of humanity in

that respect. They know humanity is going to

end, but when is it going to end.

This suggests that not only did the Ropeprovide a tangible object through which to pon-der deep time, it also evoked an emotionalresponse in the learners that included deep fearof the future.

Our observations revealed that in both set-tings many learners expressed a visceral sense offear about the future. The campers, all betweenthe ages of 8 and 10, made 16 future eventmarkers that they added to the Rope during theweek of camp. Of these, half reflected very neg-ative predictions about the near and deep future,

including such events as the sun exploding, themoon exploding, mass extinction, and a comingworld war.

This negative sense of humans’ role in theearth and our future was also evident duringsome of the Spotlight activities. For example,after being asked about his thoughts on theactivity, one Museum visitor responded, ‘It’smind blowing how long this is on the scale ofthings and how short a time it takes for humansto destroy everything.’

TWO FUNDAMENTAL TENSIONS

While the Rope was generally well receivedby the educators, our observations and inter-views also revealed two fundamental tensionsfor their practice. One tension was in their ped-agogical approaches – either inquiry or trans-mission – and the other was in their learninggoals for teaching deep time – either wonder orrelativity. The educators tended to favor one orthe other of these two elements, though wefound that the alignment between approachesand goals was varied and that some educators’practices varied their approaches in response tothe group of learners.

Pedagogical Approaches: Transmission vs.

Inquiry

The tension between an inquiry and a trans-mission approach to learner engagement is illus-trated through a comparison of the educatorswe observed. This tension in educator practicehas been observed before in thisMuseum (Allenand Crowley, 2014) and is explored further herein order to consider how each approach may beused to its full advantage. Amy, the camp coun-selor, used a strong inquiry approach, character-ized by learner autonomy, conversation andreflection. This approach stands in contrast with



the transmission-oriented approaches that weobserved from several docents. The transmis-sion approach assumes that knowledge is aproperty that gets transmitted from a moreknowledgeable person, the docent, to a lessknowledgeable person, theMuseum visitor.

Amy, the counselor, began the activity witha few framing questions to the whole group, andquickly transitioned to a hands-on activity. Shedistributed the loose and undated felt eventmarkers to pairs of students, asked them to placethem along the simple Rope, and then steppedback to allow the children free reign of the activ-ity. She encouraged the students to discuss theirideas with their partners, but did not guide themto place the markers anywhere in particular.During this time, there was a lot of debate bothwithin and between groups about absolute andrelative position of the event markers. Amyencouraged the debate, explained that theywould have a chance to review and adjust allmarkers as a group and did not weigh in on the‘correct’ placement.

After a full 10 minutes of having camperswalk up and down the Rope, loudly debatingwith one another, Amy asked them to sittogether in a close jumble on the floor near themore recent end of the Rope. The childrenimmediately began to ask questions about therelative position of events, as seen in thisexchange about dinosaurs.

Amy: Let’s work on this dinosaur end

Boy (looking at the position of the dinosaurextinction event marker 65million years ago):How could the dinosaurs be so close to the future?

Amy: Is it possible that dinosaurs are arecent thing? [making air quotesaround ‘recent thing’]

Many children (shouting): Yes!

The children, who were emboldened by theauthority Amy gave them, began to loudly dis-cuss how something that feels very old, likedinosaurs, could actually be recent in geologictime. Several campers also vociferously ques-tioned the placement of other event markers.For example, one child asked, ‘What arehumans doing back there?’ pointing to markersrelating to human existence which were placedat about 500 million years ago near the firstshelledmarine animals (see Figure 2). Amy usedthis question, along with others like it, toencourage the children to articulate argumentsfor or against the placement of event markers.These loosely organized debates led to Amy andthe campers moving several event markers tonew locations.

Amy then told the campers that theywere going to compare their guesses to whatscientists know about these events, at whichpoint she unfurled the key Rope, lining it upnext to the simple Rope so that event markerson each Rope could be compared. The chil-dren immediately erupted into noisy exclama-tions, noting where their guesses were correctand where they still needed to be adjusted.Amy asked, ‘What did we discover?’ and onechild said, ‘All the things that we’re familiarwith are piled up.’ This led to several minutesof discussion about the relative scale of eventson the Rope.

Throughout the activity, Amy allowed thechildren to construct their own knowledgeabout events in deep time. She pushed them tomove beyond random guessing and towardsdefensible ideas based on prior knowledge.Even when the children’s guesses did not alignwith existing scientific understanding, Amy didnot make immediate corrections and insteadcontinued to press the children to articulatetheir reasoning. When she did finally reveal theaccurate scientific information, she continued


to use a discovery method by letting the chil-dren walk around comparing the two ropes.Amy’s inquiry approach is reflected in thiscomment where she emphasizes the role ofplay and talk for knowledge building for thecampers.

We compared the answer key Rope to our

Rope that we had played with. . .and the talk

that came out of that

We also observed a strong transmissionapproach in other educators’ practices. Forexample, after some experimentation with bothropes, both Denise and her partner, Faith,

developed a transmission dominated approachto the deep time activity. They would begin byintroducing the concept of the Rope and thenintroduced each of the touchable objects.Although they asked visitors to try to sequencethe touchable objects, this was often heavilymanaged by the docents with frequent correc-tion and guidance, which was followed by thedocents facilitating the object’s placement at thecorrect point along the Rope without allowingfor substantive opportunity for the visitors toarticulate their ideas for sequencing. Weobserved this emphasis on transmission in thefollowing interaction between Denise and afamily group consisting of a mother and a

Figure 2. Campers gathering around the Rope to discuss their placement of event markers for human habitationalongside a marker for the Paleozoic Era. (Photo credit: Marijke Hecht/LRDC).


father, their middle-school-aged son and high-school-aged daughter.

Denise began by introducing the con-cept of deep time and explaining how theRope is scaled to reflect the entire historyof the earth. She then invited the group tolook at the touchable objects, where sheintroduced the stromatolite, explaining howit is formed and how old they can be,which elicited some visible interest from thefamily and an audible ‘hmmh’ from thedaughter. Denise then began to explainwhat each of the touchable objects werebefore asking the family to try to place theobjects in the correct sequence on the woo-den bench. The daughter took up this chal-lenge, thinking out loud about whether thetrilobite should come before the dinosaurclaw. Denise did not use questions orprompts to encourage the daughter toexpand or explain her thinking. Instead, shetransitioned to transmitting informationabout the objects to the group. She thenworked closely with the two children (themother and father had receded by thispoint) by directing the sequence of each ofthe objects on the bench and walking withthem to place the now-ordered objects inthe correct position along the Rope.

Later, when Denise and Faith wereasked about how the activity went, Denisereflected her sense that there was a lot ofinformation for them to impart to the visi-tors, ‘we were giving them so much, we weregiving them the timeline, we were givingthem the touchables. . .’ Faith, added thatthey were, ‘helping them place their itemsthat were touchables.’ Here, we can see howthese two docents viewed the activity as onein which there was a lot of informationwhich they worked to transmit to Museumvisitors.

Learning Goals: Wonder vs. Relativity

The second tension was between two dif-ferent learning goals: some educators worked topromote a feeling of wonder about deep time,while others aimed to increase learners under-standing by exploring the relativity of deeptime. This relativity includes both the relativesequence of events on the geologic timeline, aswell as the relative duration of the events (Res-nick et al., 2017). Robert and Kelly, one of thedocent pairs, individually tended towards eachof these two approaches; they also demonstratedhow they could be brought together for greatereffectiveness.

Kelly’s playful interaction with Museumvisitors suggested that she had an inquiryapproach, which she used to encourage won-der about deep time in the visitors. Asgroups approached the spotlight activity,Kelly would hold up the coiled key Ropeand ask them things such as ‘Do you everthink about how old the earth is?’ or‘Would you like to pull out the line of life?’She encouraged them to take the end of theRope which represented the formation ofthe earth 4.6 billion years ago, and to walkacross the Museum floor with it until theRope was completely unfurled. During thiswalk, she would point out a few of theevents on the Rope and frequently encour-aged people to place the touchable objectsalong the Rope. Although visitors, bothchildren and adults alike, often resisted,Kelly stressed that it was alright for them tomake guesses, and use what she called their‘inner child’. Her approach led almost all ofthe Museum visitors that she engaged withto participate in the activity in a relaxedfashion. When we asked Kelly in her inter-view to reflect on her approach, her empha-sis on wonder came through:


And then, whenwemade it a game it took

the pressure off.Who cares if you get it right? It

was a fun activity. It wasn’t like ‘I have to learn

this blah blah blah science. I’m just having fun at

theMuseum today.’

Her partner docent, Robert, specificallyemphasized content and the relativity of deeptime, both in terms of sequence and duration.Robert is the docent who brought touchableobjects from his personal collection and he waseager to give visitors a chance to examine theobjects. For example, after providing an over-view of the scale of the Rope to a family groupwith adult children Robert asked them to esti-mate several of the objects’ locations. He thensequentially considered each of the touchableobjects with the group, using a transmissionapproach to give explanations for each object’sformation. In some cases, as with the stromato-lite and the piece of banded iron, he providedfairly detailed explanations of their formation,but in all cases, we observed his emphasis on therelative nature of the objects. When asked todescribe his approach, Robert reflected,

It’s more trying to put it in relative dating,

relative time. As opposed to specific times. Did

this occur before this?What do you think

occurred first?

We can see from this that Robert valuedthe visitors learning specific content about geo-logical processes and deep time over wonder.

DISCUSSION

It is important to consider how these twoeducational activities – a brief one-time interac-tion on the Museum floor and a week-longinteraction during a summer camp – presentvery different constraints and affordances for

the educators and learners. How do these differ-ent Museum settings support the application ofa transmission or an inquiry approach to teach-ing deep time? How might both wonder andrelativity be explored with learners?

In the summer camp, educators were ableto build conceptual knowledge over an extended1-hour lesson and to continue this thinkingwith campers over the course of the week. Thissetting provided a platform for the inquiry-based approach that Amy used in her presenta-tion of deep time. She was able to let the cam-pers construct their understanding of how deeptime works through a series of scaffolded activi-ties that moved from independent work in pairs,to large group discussion, to large group com-parison with scientific consensus. She used thephysical timeline and made it into an object ofsurprise. Amy did not waver from this inquiryapproach, and we observed her using it to sup-port both wonder and understanding of relativ-ity of deep time.

This longer camp program contrasts shar-ply with the spotlight activity on the Museumfloor, where docents have to drawMuseum visi-tors in and then have only a short time forengagement. This setting requires docents toread the visitors quickly and adapt approachesalmost instantaneously or risk losing an educa-tional opportunity. Denise, one of the mostexperienced docents at the Museum, noted inher interview that Museum visitors have verydifferent interests and expectations.

For some it was really the start of ‘OK,

we’re thinking beyond this’ and for some it was

just, ‘Oh!’.We got the ahamoment and that was

pretty much as far as they were going to go with

it.

However, we observed that not all the edu-cators calibrated their pedagogical approaches



to respond to these different learner expecta-tions. Denise and Faith relied almost exclusivelyon transmission to ensure that they could con-vey important ideas about deep time. Wenoticed that during their spotlight activity, visi-tors may have received specific pieces of relevantinformation, but did not ask as many questionsor make as many excited comments as we sawwith Robert and Kelly.

Their heavy use of transmission rests on theassumption that knowledge is object to be con-veyed from teacher to learner (Allen and Crow-ley, 2014). However, understanding of deeptime requires conceptual change in which learn-ing is a process, rather than the possession ofknowing a thing (Resnick et al., 2017). Thissuggests that the learner is not forming a specificcognitive object in their mind, but is instead in acognitive state that supports the process ofknowing (Hammer, Elby, Scherr, and Redish,2005). Based on this, deep time is not a cogni-tive object to be grasped correctly or incorrectly– it cannot be transmitted. Instead, understand-ing of deep time builds as part of a process oflearning that draws on existing learnerresources. A learner may know about some-thing, but they may not be able to engage andparticipate with the knowledge; in other words,they may not yet understand it (Greeno et al.,1996).

Ideally educators are facilitating the lear-ner’s movement from factoid-based knowl-edge of deep time to conceptualunderstanding of deep time. Educators mayfeel that the looseness of an inquiryapproach, what Kelly called ‘chaos’, presentstoo many challenges in a short time periodand in the unpredictability of the Museumfloor. In fact, we observed Denise and Faithbegin to attempt some inquiry approachesbut then abandon them in favor of transmis-sion. During our later interview, Denise

wondered if she was giving the visitors toomuch information, indicating her own senseof the tension between transmission andinquiry.

We do not wish to imply that transmissionis a wrong approach. To the contrary, in cer-tain situations, it may be the most effectivestrategy. Instead, our observations suggest thatthe flexible use of both transmission andinquiry may be the most effective strategy forreaching visitors that enter the Museum with arange of interests and expectations. Weobserved this responsive and flexible approachfrom Robert and Kelly. While they eachtended towards either transmission or inquiryto meet their respective learning goals, theyalso adjusted strategies as needed. Kelly, whowas strongly oriented towards a learning goalof wonder, tried leading with inquiryapproaches on many occasions. However, sheadapted to use transmission as an approachwhen visitors did not engage quickly in theactivity. In these instances, she would talk visi-tors through key aspects of the Rope, pointingout the density of events at the more recentend of the Rope, where she said ‘life justexplodes’. Her use of transmission still placedan emphasis on the vastness of deep time andaligned with her learning goal of wonder.Robert, who tended to use transmission toconvey relativity as a core concept of deep time,still infused several of his interactions withinquiry approaches. For example, he wouldsometimes encourage visitors to formulatetheir own arguments for why to place objectsin different locations along the Rope. Ourobservation of this pair suggests that the ten-sion between transmission and inquiry, andwonder and relativity, can be used to goodeffect when educators are comfortable employ-ing both strategies in response to learners’apparent engagement and interest.


CONCLUSION

Natural history Museums, rich in collec-tions and exhibits related to the Earth’s history,are uniquely positioned to tackle critical issuesof the Anthropocene, such as deep time, withthe public. However, the scalar leap needed toconceptualize deep time has proven a challeng-ing and persistent problem of practice. TheRope was meant to be a tangible object thatwould act as a resource to help educators leadlearners in exploration of the deep geologicaltimescale in order to make connections to thepresent and future. This approach was intendedto support the Museum’s on-going goal toengage visitors in considering the Anthro-pocene and humanity’s role in Earth systems.The Rope leveraged the work of a research-practice partnership to integrate understandingof learning and tangible objects (Horn, 2018)into the construction of a simple and inexpen-sive tool that the Museum could easily modifyand use in multiple learning settings (Hechtet al., 2019).

An unexpected side benefit of using theRope in different Museum settings was theopportunity it afforded for Museum educatorsto reflect on their practice. After noticing howeducators both identified their own defaultapproaches and questioned whether that wasalways the right fit for different audiences andsettings, theMuseum is now exploring ways theRope might be used for professional develop-ment as a tool both for reflection and practicingnew techniques. This is an opportunity toexplore the relative strengths of the differentapproaches and to consider how they may beused in different combinations depending onthe circumstance. This additional application ofthe Rope, in addition to further developing it asa tool for exploring deep time withMuseum vis-itors, extends its value as a tool for educator

training. The Museum education departmenthas begun to use this as part of their on-rampingprocess for new docents and will continue torefine the tool.

We found that the Rope generated aweand understanding in many learners, but alsoevoked fear about our present and future. Inher recent book, geologist Marcia Bjornerud(2018) argues that thinking like a geologist isessential for people to understand our humanrelationship with the natural world. Here wesaw a tool used to explore deep time being usedto help learners connect to the Anthropocene,our present and our future. This connectionappeared to be strongest where educators useda pedagogical balance between wonder andcontent, such as the relativity of deep time,whether through a transmission or an inquiry-based approach. It is this balance, and theseconnections, that can foster and encourage21st century naturalists. However, we needadditional tools to support educators as theywork with learners to face, and even transformtheir fear of the future. END

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to the educators at the CarnegieMuseum of Natural History for their contributions tothis work. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewersfor their helpful comments, which greatly improvedthis manuscript. The research reported in this articlewas made possible by a grant from the Spencer Foun-dation (#201600114). The views expressed are thoseof the authors and do not necessarily reflect the viewsof the Spencer Foundation.

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SUPPORTING INFORMATION

Additional supporting information can befound in the online version of this article:

Appendix S1. Rope of Deep Time markersincluded on the prototypes.



https://serc.carleton.edu/quantskills/activities/TPGeoTime.html

https://serc.carleton.edu/quantskills/activities/TPGeoTime.html

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how could the dinosaurs be so close to the future? : how

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