ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the thinking of several teen girls' while they participated in a socioscientific project. The idea that the learning process should relate to their lives is obviously a key component in their sense of empowerment. Mia is an earnest teenager with a pale, freckled face and long curly red hair, older and more sagacious than her fourteen years. The author meet Mia in the fall of 1993, the first year of the Clayoquot Sound project at Bayside Middle School. In that first year of the project, we lay the foundation for a content-based technology investigation, not using video and multimedia to the extent that we will in the following year. However, we used pen, paper, word processing, and a variety of visual resources as constructionist tools. The constructionist approach is evident in how we bring the range of ideas into the culture, by discussing the issues and designing portfolios.
