Search

This practice-as-research project investigates how a piece of site-responsive Installation Art, titled Triple Point Dunnage (exhibited in Royal William Yard, June 2009), can be used to generate knowledge about memory work through experience of site. Working in dialogue with the ideas of Daniel C. Dennett, Lucy Lippard and Gaston Bachelard, I attempted to create a permeable and fluctuating creative setting for the memory work of participants. An approach that used site as a stimulant within a process which also incorporated theoretical themes. During the period of design and construction, I interacted with and recorded interviews with people who had a personal connection with the site or with an interest in how memory works. The final installation presented layers of spoken fragmented content in a dialectic relationship within the installation’s spatial construction. The responses of the installation’s visitors and participants were collated through a response book and interviews. These were analysed in order to discover to what extent, if at all, the properties I had developed and designed into the work had shaped the engagements of the participants. The multi-valented properties of the work generated an array of responses that suggested that the viewers had fashioned their experience by blending the fragmented stories of others with their own personal histories. This engagement resembles Dennett’s concept of “self-narrator” and resonates with Bachelard’s concept of the fusion of physical and psychological space and Lippard’s understanding of place. By exploring memory through site Triple Point Dunnage generated a sense of place that was a fusion of the participants’ responses to the external physical environment and their associative memories stimulated by the affective fragmented properties of the work.

Integration of learning has widely become recognized as an essential educational outcome for U.S. college students in the twenty-first century. This study investigates integration of learning as a collegiate outcome, defined as the demonstrated ability to link various skills and knowledge learned in a variety of contexts. A grounded theory approach was used to investigate the primary research question of how integration of learning develops in college students, identifying the smaller “microsteps” of development within integration of learning. This qualitative study focused on integration of learning among college freshmen by examining 194 interviews with 97 students (one interview at the beginning of their first year and another in the fall of the sophomore year) at two liberal arts colleges. These interviews were collected as part of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education. There were 577 examples of integration identified among the 194 interviews. Two conceptual frames were used in this study to investigate integration of learning: self-authorship and transfer of learning. Three distinct types of integration of learning emerged from analyzing the data: (a) Connection, the discovery of a similarity between ideas which themselves remain distinctive; (b) Application, the use of knowledge from one context in another; and (c) Synthesis, the creation of new knowledge by combining two or more insights. These three categories comprised the main microsteps of integration of learning. A longitudinal analysis of these data showed a trend toward diversification of integrative method over time. In the second-year interviews, there were more examples of integration of learning, which were more evenly distributed among the three types of integration. This trend was also evident in developmental analyses. From a constructive-developmental perspective, students with a more advanced, internally-grounded level of self-authorship used the three types of integration of learning more equally than students with a less advanced developmental orientation. The contexts in which integration of learning happened varied widely and examples often bridged more than one context, indicating an intercontextual quality of integration of learning. Implications for practice are offered, which educators can use toward promoting the connection, application, and synthesis emblematic of integration of learning.