The instructional laboratory invites students to engage in various dimensions of learning (e.g., affective, cognitive, and psychomotor). However, persistent traditions may also limit opportunities for equity/excellence, entangling students’ processes of empowerment or marginalization. To better understand students’ laboratory learning, this rhizomatic and arts-based study collected 140 storyboards depicting empowerment (n = 70) and marginalization (n = 70) from 70 general chemistry student participants across the Autumn 2024 and Spring 2025 semesters. A subset of participants was also interviewed about their storyboards as an additional follow-up. Overall, this study investigates (1) how do students’ storyboards of their laboratory experiences, if at all, align with Meaningful Learning in terms of cognitive, psychomotor, and affective dimensions? We then loop back, holistically reconnecting with storyboards and interviews to explore (2) how rhizoanalysis changes how we detect, understand, and project meaning via chemistry education research-practice. Findings show that students may not experience Meaningful Learning as a synthesis of all three dimensions, with more attention toward the affective (especially in marginalized storyboards). Emergent themes indicated that working individually and navigating (un)certainty are surprisingly represented in marginalized and empowered storyboards equally. The research team made sense of these conflicting themes via rhizoanalysis, revealing calcified and ambiguous laboratory traditions pertinent to our contexts such as (1) confusion on when learning is supposed to occur, (2) the (un)necessary fixation with experimental errors, and (3) the nature of student collaboration. Implications include reconsidering how we intend students to engage in laboratory uncertainty and how we promote students’ seeing peers as valuable assets for learning. Furthermore, our use of rhizoanalysis foregrounds the affordances/limitations of nonlinear thinking, with further recommendations to leverage undergraduate perspectives as catalysts for meaning making.
Petzing et al. (Wed,) studied this question.