How Rules Shape Experience

Abstract

Rules guide and constrain participants' actions as they participate in any educational activity. This ethnographically driven case study examines how organizational rules—the implicit and explicit regulations that constrain actions and interactions—influence children to use science in the experiential educational activity of raising 4-H market animals. Observations, interviews, and artifacts gathered are interpreted using Dewey's (1938) theory of an experiential continuum, with a focus on how social control in the form of explicit organizational rules influenced the children to use science. This study provides examples of two explicit organizational rules, market animal weight restrictions and record book rules, and analyzes the influence of these rules on bringing science into the children's 4-H experience. This study provides evidence that children involved in 4-H are influenced by organizational rules to incorporate skills and processes of science into their actions.