How Science Happens
Inside the Annual Learning Sciences Conference--A Conversation with the Researchers Working to Understand How People Learn
Every scientific field has its annual gathering. Physicists, neuroscientists, computer scientists. For researchers in the learning sciences, that gathering is the annual conference of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). This summer, nearly 900 researchers from 38 countries came together at the University of California, Irvine to share new discoveries, reconnect with colleagues, and ask one of the most important questions in science:
How do people learn?
While I was there, I took the opportunity to create a very special episode of The Science of Learning podcast. For these episodes, I usually interview a single researcher. But for this episode, I created a documentary about the conference. It’s the first documentary ever made about an ISLS conference. It’s not about the research presentations; it’s not about scientific findings; it’s about the people who make this extraordinary intellectual community what it is.
Every year, the learning sciences conference is filled with hundreds of presentations about how children learn mathematics, how adults solve problems, how people learn to create music and visual art, how AI can support education, how collaborative learning works, and much more. This research is usually available online and in print. I wanted my documentary to capture something more intangible. Something that most people never see. I wanted to capture what it feels like to spend four days surrounded by people who have devoted their professional lives to understanding learning.
You often imagine scientists working alone at a computer or in a lab, but science has never really worked that way. Science depends on conversation, collaboration, argument, and friendship. New ideas emerge when researchers challenge one another, combine perspectives, and build on one another’s work.
I’d argue that the learning sciences is more collaborative than any other field. It’s always been open and welcoming to people from different academic disciplines, using different theories and methodologies.
What Is Learning?
From its beginnings in the early 1990s, the learning sciences brought together people who normally belonged to different academic worlds. Cognitive psychologists, educational researchers, computer scientists, anthropologists, learning designers, artificial intelligence researchers, curriculum developers, and many others all discovered that they were asking versions of the same question.
How do people learn?
That interdisciplinary foundation remains one of the defining strengths of the field today. My favorite part of the documentary is when I ask several conference attendees a simple question:
“What is learning?”
The answers are remarkably different. One researcher described learning as curiosity and growth. Another talked about changing performance. Another emphasized creating and making. Another focused on emotion. Another described learning as updating mental models. Imagine what happens when you put all of these together! The union, the intersection, the synergy. That’s why you need people to come together in person.
Scientific fields need to grow and renew themselves if science is to move forward. In thriving scientific disciplines, there are always new discoveries, new research labs, and new patents. The top scholars will eventually grow older and retire. The field only continues if young scholars keep joining the field, from year to year. The annual conference is an essential opportunity for newer participants to meet more senior scholars, and start to feel they’re part of a shared enterprise. At this year’s conference, nearly half of the attendees were first-time participants. They arrived from universities around the world hoping not only to present their work but also to find collaborators, mentors, and friends.
Senior researchers—including people I’ve known for decades—returned to reconnect with colleagues they’ve worked alongside throughout their careers. I’ve been attending this conference for almost twenty years, and editing The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences has given me the opportunity to work with many of the people who appear in the documentary. But we all try hard to keep the conference from being exclusive. One of its defining characteristics is generosity. Established scholars introduce graduate students to colleagues. Conversations begun after presentations often become collaborations that last for years.
Watching this diversity of people interact reminds me that science is not simply a collection of published papers. It’s a community that renews itself every year.
Why Do You Come to ISLS?
Several people I interviewed used exactly the same word to describe ISLS.
A scholarly community is an intellectual home.
At the beginning of the documentary, Anna Keune calls it home. That’s pretty powerful. It surprised me when I first heard it, but after thinking about it, I realized it perfectly captures what makes this community so special. Researchers travel thousands of miles, and go to other countries not only because they need to present their latest scientific finding. They come because they’ve found a community of people who understand the questions that motivate them every day. Last year, I was at the same conference in Helsinki, Finland, and many of these same people were there. It’s an international conference; we alternate between the United States every even year, and outside the U.S. every odd year. Next year, we go to Bombay, India.
Historically, learning scientists devoted much of their attention to STEM education. Increasingly, however, researchers are recognizing that studying learning in music, visual art, theater, design, and other creative domains can deepen our understanding of learning itself. This year’s conference included an Arts Gallery and Performance track that reflected this growing movement, reminding us that learning is both scientific and deeply human.
One motivation for me to do this documentary is because it aligns with this podcast, The Science of Learning. Science isn’t just about knowledge and ideas. Science is about community and about daily practice. It’s not just what you think; it’s what you do.
This documentary also aligns with this Substack newsletter, The Science of Creativity, because it’s about where ideas come from.
Creativity doesn’t happen alone.
Creativity happens in groups.
Creativity emerges from conversations.
I hope that whether you’re a researcher, educator, graduate student, or simply someone fascinated by how people learn, you’ll come away with a better appreciation not only for the science itself, but also for the people who make that science possible.
When I began planning for this documentary, I searched for other YouTube documentaries about academic conferences. I didn’t find any. I found videos of keynote talks. I found a few promotional videos made by the communications offices of professional societies. But I didn’t find any videos that captured what an academic community feels like from the inside. How Science Happens isn’t about the scientific findings from the learning sciences. If you’re interested in how people learn, I hope you’ll watch the many interviews in The Science of Learning podcast. This documentary is about scientific communities; it’s about why people come together. It’s about creativity and collaboration.
Here’s the most important thing I learned about making a documentary:
A documentary isn’t about the video; it’s about the story.
The creative process of making a documentary is fascinating. Keep reading if you’d like to learn more about:
The four most important themes in the learning sciences community
Who I interviewed and what I asked about
How to weave a coherent narrative from disconnected clips of video
