The city as a living laboratory for innovative ecological learning

Background/Question/Methods

The Indianapolis / City as Living Laboratory (I/CaLL) project, is a city-wide civic collaboration engaging in cross-sector research that builds on precedent projects, extends work in place-based and service learning traditions, and uses the city itself as an informal science learning environment for enhancing urban sustainability. This project creates a place-based science learning experience of the city, the next generation of an urban science museum, linking the lived experience of a neighborhood’s urban ecosystem with curated, artistic interpretations of science at six destination locations. The sites are physically connected to the urban water system in Indianapolis, IN. Four art forms (visual, music, poetry, and dance) respond to scientific concepts in the city’s six urban waterways, using inductive reasoning to promote learning. Locative media adds layers of access and interpretation for learners at any time of the day or night. The unprecedented scale of this project provides a full measure of informal science service learning at a city scale, offering data that can change how science learning is measured and truly embodying the concept of the city as a living science learning lab.

Results/Conclusions

I/CaLL will explore how artistic installations and programs can promote community engagement in science thinking, irrespective of wealth or privilege. The proposition suggests that arts discourses and science processes can be revealed and interrogated as part of the full experience of living in a city. By exploring the city as a learning unit, I/CaLL extends science learning into an environment and context that challenges the existing paradigm of sanctioned science in facility-based learning or media consumed at home by (1) accepting  that everyday natural phenomena, in themselves, are science learning opportunities, (2) revealing  and leveraging  these discoveries through the affective power of the arts, (3) building  on prior knowledge about self-directed place-based nature learning as the stepping stone to building science mastery, and (4) expanding  beyond youth development to consider the family and cultural group as the place where science knowledge is negotiated in society. In this case, the city of Indianapolis is the embodiment of a “free choice” learning environment that we hypothesize will provide new evidence of how the private, public, and cultural sectors of society engaged together in informal science learning, will result in a more resilient society.