Cultural probes for environmental education: Designing learning materials to engage children and teenagers with local biodiversity

Whether researchers attribute one or more functions to an item, the authors see the CP tech- nique as an opportunity to stimulate “empathy”, “closeness”, “discussion” and “collaboration” between researchers and participants. CP should also support degrees of “playfulness”, “fun” and “engagement” along with the completion tasks or activities. In the context of design-led research, Thoring et al. [22] present CP and their potential in: providing "a deeper understanding of a given theme", "making the invisible visible", "inspire design", "foster creativity", and "engender interpretation". Such advantages position CP within a qualitative approach that, at times, can pose challenges as well. As a result, the authors also highlight obstacles encountered in the CP literature. While their list is exten- sive, here we provide seven challenges that we believe best encapsulate work with CP in the context of EE, namely: "1) finding a balance between information and inspiration, 2) acknowledging uncertainty and ambiguity of probe results, 3) no guarantee for a "hit" with the participants, 4) time for creating a good probe, 5) time for interpreting rich data, 6) par- ticipants perceiving probe use as another "job", and (7) “asking in a way that gives you already answers that you know". Inquiry-based learning EEM should not only convey information, but they also “should build lifelong skills that enable learners to address environmental issues” and that emphasize creative thinking skills, such as the formulation of new questions [4]. From this pedagogical perspective, our use of the CP

technique in this study is grounded in inquiry-based learning (IBL), since it was our intention to use the CP to elicit responses from participants through questioning. Informed by a constructivist approach, IBL has mostly impacted the learning sciences with positive implications for environmental education [23, 24]. The ’learning-through-questions’ that forms the core of this approach is particularly valuable. For example, the work of King [25] demonstrates that question-based learning strategies are beneficial in developing critical- thinking and learner autonomy. Concerning learner autonomy, the author notes that “self- generated elaborations have been found to be more conducive to learning then elaborations provided by a teacher, textbook or other external source”. As detailed in the work of Nappi [26], as in the work of King [25], the rationale behind inquiry-based learning, which draws on a Socratic tradition, positions the act of questioning, individually or among peers, as a tool with the potential to prompt a learner to think in new ways and to connect new understand- ings with existing knowledge. Such a process has implications for developing higher levels of thinking [26] and can yield in greater use of logical and deductive reasoning. Of relevance for the FG project is the argument by Nappi that questioning is essential for our capacity to “make sense of the surrounding world”—a foundational attribute of environmental consciousness [27]. We are accustomed to questioning in science education [28]. However, it is essential to

reinforce that ecological literacy also benefits from question-based approaches. For example, the work of Braus and Wood [23] state that "to produce a world of critical and creative thinkers that can help solve environmental problems, we need to encourage students to ask questions and think critically". Similarly, the work of Tolppanen and Aksela [24] highlights the impor- tance of learners’ questions when teaching about climate change. These examples support the idea that environmental education benefits from a learner’s questioning approach. And yet we must distinguish inquiry-based learning from the simple act of questioning, as IBL requires a sustained and reasoned approach to formulating questions [29]. Nonetheless, the IBL literature provides an important pedagogical framework for the design of the toolkit devised for this study. PLOS ONE Cultural probes for environmental education PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262853 February 10, 2022 4 / 30