teacher for 21 century

Invisible Differences: Educating Teachers for 21st Century Contexts

This paper details a multimedia assignment designed to address the problem of preparing apparently homogeneous cohorts of pre-service teachers to teach in highly diverse schools. Drawing from more than 300 pre-service teachers’ digital family history projects, I discuss the power of multimedia to extend dialogic interaction on human diversity. In the presentation, I offer a theoretical foundation using this pedagogical approach to move teacher education students to personalize issues of diversity by examining their own differences.
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Invisible Differences: Educating Teachers for 21st Century ContextsInvisible Differences is an online archive of pre-service teachers’ family history projects, initially designed by graduate students in an advanced instructional design course (http://www.uky.edu/~casenet/InvisibleDifferences/index.html). As a diversity signature assignment for elementary social studies, the family history project requires a class presentation delivered in a digital medium as a multimedia story and a final reflective paper on the ways such an assignment can be adapted for elementary students. The assignment is inquiry-based, requiring students to gather, analyze, and interpret data from various sources. Students combine information from interviews, family artifacts and photographs with historical texts, archives, hyperlinks to Internet sites, geographic tools, and other resources. It involves hearing and interpreting family stories, exploring historical resources and perspectives, selecting artifacts and original documents, and employing a variety of multimedia technologies to compose digital family histories. Gathering family history information, analyzing and interpreting it in a cohesive multimedia story enacts self-narrative in interactive ways that situate historical research in familiar contexts.Personalizing DifferenceKnowing who you are and where you come from is one of the most important pieces of information that one can have. This project opened my eyes to a lot of differences that existed among my classmates. As similar as we look on the outside, I have found that we are actually a very diverse group… who all have unique histories. Establishing a concept of diversity and understanding that we are all immigrants [is the] purpose of this family history project. For analysis of the Invisible Differences Project and interpretation of learning outcomes, I rely on narrative inquiry, broadly defined as the examination of stories lived and told (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996). A tension that often exists in these social studies methods courses revolves around students’ limited exposure to cultural diversity, the extent to which they have assimilated to the culture of the university, and the need to prepare them for effectively teaching children from a wide range of cultures and socioeconomic conditions. Many are reluctant to discuss human differences and voice frustration in course evaluations with what they say is undue emphasis on issues of diversity. However, without materializing what they understand about diversity or how they view different others, it is difficult to assure these teacher education students are adequately prepared for the diversity that now exists in the public schools. The family history assignment provides an opportunity to examine and discuss human differences in a manner that both personalizes and politicizes issues of privilege and power. While the process of collecting information, analyzing and interpreting it, and composing a multimedia presentation are important learning activities in this assignment, making it public in presentation sessions is the most essential activity for reconstructing schemas on human differences. Both presenting and being audience for the family history presentations are key learning activities for the dialogic interaction that changes the way students think and talk about human differences. As one student said, “This project opened my eyes to a lot of differences that existed among my classmates. As similar as we look on the outside, I have found that we are actually a very diverse group of young women who all have unique histories.” Intersections for Situated DiscourseImagine a class of 30 pre-service teachers presenting multimedia family histories one after the other over four or five class sessions. One begins with a photograph of the last slave in her family. She shows a map of Mississippi delineating segregated communities and talks about the abandoned school where freed slaves built their own community. She tells a family story about how difficult it was to leave the plantation and that many slaves chose to remain rather than endure the abject poverty of free Blacks living in the old school building. Another student begins her family history with a photograph of her parents, her mother who is White and her father who is Black. She tells a story about recently meeting her White grandparents for the first time and how little she knew of them because they had disowned her mother for marrying a Black man. Several classes later, another student presents her family history by showing the plantation in Mississippi, once owned and operated by her ancestors and now a tourist attraction. Connections are made between descendents of slaves and slave owners and the history of slavery in the United States becomes personally relevant in ways it had not for the students who are privileged by being White. Questions are asked and conversations on race unfold in deeply personal ways that otherwise might have been more polite than authentic. As one student said, “This project was possibly one of the most interesting projects I have completed in my college career.” Proposed PresentationIn this session, I present a digital collage of selected family stories and discuss some ways multimedia extends and enhances the aesthetic power of narrative. I also provide an analysis of the dialectical struggle between student, historical artifacts, and medium in the ongoing process of constructing identity as teachers. I conclude by discussing findings from the investigation of students’ multimedia family history projects in relation to gains in awareness, appreciation, and understanding of human diversity, as well as indicators of increased potential for effectively teaching widely diverse public school students. ReferencesClandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1996). Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes: Teacher stories—Stories of schools. Educational Researcher, 25(3), 24-30.