Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Personal Meaning Mapping As A Tool To Uncover Learning From An Out-Of-Doors Free-Choice Learning Garden, Deborah L. Bailey, John H. Falk

Research in Outdoor Education

Garden-based learning (GBL), a form of outdoor education contextualized and framed within unpredictable and real-world learning environments, is ideally suited to the teaching of science. However, the vast majority of GBL educational research has utilized a cognitive and positivist research paradigm, one that artificially restricts the investigative lens. The goal of the larger project from which this paper was drawn was to develop a better understanding of how youth perceived a garden experience. This paper shares the affordances and constraints of the constructivist framework utilized and the primary measurement tool, Person Meaning Mapping (PMM). Despite some inherent limitations, the PMM …