ABSTRACT
We think of the laboratory as something that belongs to the natural sciences. A laboratory can be any classroom where students develop practices closely identified with the research methods of a discipline. Students collaborate to inform, reinforce, and critique each other’s practices. This can occur in any discipline, since disciplines are defined by their methodology as much as by their dominant question. Laboratories can occur at any level of the curriculum. In my thinking about these classrooms, I include several classrooms not ordinarily thought of as laboratories: writing workshops, group work breakouts for problem-based learning, computer-based instruction in geographic information systems, and archival methods courses conducted in archives. When we see these settings as laboratories, we can structure them more effectively. Similarly, when we reinterpret the traditional laboratory as a variety of collaborative learning, we can develop better ways of assessing what goes on there.
