The Designed for Learning seminar engages LaGuardia faculty in a sustained, classroom-focused process of exploration, experimentation, and change. It brings together faculty from different disciplines and backgrounds, addressing diverse course content and utilizing a range of digital tools. As a result, there is no single classroom approach used by all DFL participants. One reason for DFL’s success, in fact, is that it encourages faculty to try out different approaches and find out what works for their classes, their disciplines, and their students. The abundance of approaches that have emerged is exciting and valuable.
From this rich diversity of classroom practice, some patterns of pedagogy have emerged. Examining this particular collection of DFL activities and in the broader practice of DFL faculty, it is possible to identify three broad categories that encompass many specific approaches faculty now use with LaGuardia students:
- Web-Based Inquiry – the implementation of inquiry learning pedagogy to explore and use the abundant information resources of the World Wide Web;
- Online Dialogue – strategies of dialogue and exchange that take advantage of digital communication tools, such as email and threaded online discussions;
- Student-Authored Multimedia Projects – the use of multimedia authoring tools to enliven and empower student-authored projects, embodying a constructivist pedagogy where students participate in the social construction of knowledge.
Each of these approaches takes advantage of particular facets of new digital technology. The pedagogies involved, however, predate the emergence of new technologies. Constructivist educators often trace their roots back to John Dewey's work in the early 20th century. Socrates used what could be called dialogic methods in ancient Athens. LaGuardia itself has a rich history of student-centered and active learning pedagogy. DFL faculty have revitalized this tradition of innovation by applying it to the development of effective strategies for the new digital environment. The DFL program has facilitated this process, helping to mobilize the intellectual resources of the faculty to meet new challenges and address new opportunities.
The activities presented in this Sampler incorporate at least one of these three approaches. Many of them actually incorporate more than one – for example, many faculty use online communication to enable students to collaborate as they conduct web-based inquiry. Across the board, LaGuardia's DFL faculty have found ways to combine interactive pedagogy and interactive technology to help engage LaGuardia students in powerful learning experiences.
Web-Based Inquiry Learning
Inquiry learning is a guided process that engages students in developing and investigating challenging research questions. Instructors model good research practice and provide scaffolded assignments that help students deepen their content knowledge and build necessary skills. Faculty play a key role in designing the structure and guiding students to core resources. But as students grow in sophistication, they gain an increasing degree of autonomy, building the analytical, organizational, and critical-thinking skills needed to become "master learners."
What does this mean in practice when one is working with the web and with LaGuardia students? Sue Livingston's activity on Apartheid and Civil Rights provides one concrete example. In her Fundamentals of Reading course, Livingston's developmental students read Mark Mubane's Kaffir Boy, a memoir of growing up under the racial apartheid system in South Africa. To build students' engagement with Mubane's memoir and deepen their understanding of the story's complex issues of race, oppression, and freedom struggles, Livingston has her students explore parallels in other societies, including the Holocaust and the African- American civil rights movement. To do so, she has them read and analyze web-based primary source materials made available by PBS, the Holocaust Museum, the National Park Service, and others. Moving step by step over the course of five weeks, Livingston skillfully uses questions, writing, and discussion to focus their work and help them distill greater meaning from their findings.
Towards the end of the unit, in a computer-based simulation activity, Livingston's students compare and contrast different resistance movements, taking on roles drawn from history and responding to selected interactive questions based on their adopted identities, perspectives, and beliefs. Students post the answers or solutions they develop on the Blackboard Discussion Board and present them in class for feedback and evaluation. Livingston's carefully planned process not only helps students understand a challenging text and improve their reading skills; it also engages them in higher-order thinking activities: gathering information, interpreting it, communicating their analyses with fellow classmates, and collaborating with others in group projects.
Livingston's work is part of a broad movement in education, re-invigorating the use of inquiry learning in many settings. In 2004, the Association of American Colleges and Universities identified the importance of inquiry approaches in building complex thinking skills in a range of disciplines, highlighting as one of its top five priorities in higher education, the "deep understanding and hands-on experience with the inquiry practices of disciplines that explore the natural, social, and cultural realms." In his influential collection, Engines of Inquiry, Georgetown's Randy Bass examined the ways that web-based inquiry activities create "guided but open processes" that help students to develop the skills of master learners, encouraging "...novice learners to get closer to seeing key texts as ideas situated in a complexity...searching and sorting through possibilities and contingencies."
What does "guided but open" mean in practice? Professor John Lutz, a historian from the University of Victoria in Canada, suggests key steps that students involved in web-enhanced inquiry might take in his classroom:
- Identify and clarify a problem, an issue, an inquiry;
- Develop a vocabulary for analyzing multiple arrays of documents on the web;
- Plan and conduct research using primary and secondary electronic sources;
- Generate and critique interpretations of primary and secondary electronic sources;
- Assess and defend a variety of positions on controversial issues;
- Construct a narrative from pieces of evidence that are non-sequential;
- Plan, revise and deliver formal presentations that integrate a variety of media;
- Demonstrate leadership by planning, implementing, and assessing a variety of strategie to address the problem, issue, or inquiry;
- Develop their abilities to work independently or in groups; and,
- Refine abilities to construct and defend an argument to others.
In contrast to traditional lecture models, where students passively absorb the "authoritative" viewpoint of a single professor or textbook, Lutz suggests that inquiry approaches push students to grapple with conflicting points of view and tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty in the research process. By encouraging students to take responsibility for the learning process and giving them freedom to pursue questions that arouse their curiosity, inquiry-based approaches foster intellectual maturity and cultivate the habits of mind that support life-long learning.
Lutz highlights the careful attention to scaffolding that inquiry requires. The exact nature of the scaffolding varies, of course, depending on content, discipline, skill level and many other variables. At LaGuardia, web-based inquiry now takes place in many different disciplines, and focuses on many different topics. Nurper Gokhan uses a form of inquiry method in her General Psychology course. Bret Eynon applies a somewhat different approach in his U.S. History classroom. And Lenore Beaky, Leonard Vogt, and Gail Green-Anderson use inquiry approaches in a range of English composition and literature courses.
Developing inquiry approaches for mathematics classes takes special skill and care. Gordon Crandall, Jorge Perez, Orlando Alonso, Rudy Meangru and Prabha Betne have integrated inquiry into a range of Mathematics courses. In so doing, they often connect mathematical concepts to real world problems. In some cases they use the web to gather data about scientific problems. In others, they use the web to explore the social, cultural or historical aspects of mathematics. This approach makes mathematics less abstract and more engaging for students. Solving real-world problems helps students understand the uses of mathematics in many different contexts.
In the Allied Health area, Mary Beth Early has found an approach that builds upon inquiry to be highly successful for her Occupational Therapy students. As Early explains: "I want to awaken in students an appreciation for the levels of evidence that might be considered in making a decision related to patient care." In her Introduction to Occupational Therapy class, students investigate a patient care methodology called Evidence Based Practice (EBP). After introducing the concept with initial readings and lecture, Early asks students to deepen their understanding of EBP theory by examining a set of web-based resources created by Oxford University, McMaster University and the federal government's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Early has her students return to the web as they put the EBP approach into practice. Students break into small groups to formulate a hypothetical case study and generate clinical questions to guide focused research. They then use web-based medical literature (accessed through EBSCO Host) to develop clinical recommendations for treatment, which they post on the Discussion Board. According to Early, this process not only helps students learn specific health issues; it also helps them develop strategies for thinking through problems. At the same time, students build the skills they need to use web-based information resources in their problem-solving processes – important skills for all health care professionals.
Inquiry methods do not require the use of technology, of course. But the web does add significant value to the inquiry process. The wealth of information resources now available on the web is stunning. From the Library of Congress to the Louvre, from NASA to the National Archives, the world's great libraries, museums and universities, are constantly adding to their online collections. The LaGuardia Library has identified a range of quality online journals and databases, connecting to resources available only with an institutional license. As a result, LaGuardia students now have access to resources that previously were only available to scholars and students at the most elite institutions. Moreover, because this data is digital, students can use increasingly supple searching and sorting tools to examine and analyze it. Greater access and increased control combine to facilitate the broader classroom use of inquiry learning activities.
The web adds to the inquiry process in other ways as well. It provides students direct access not only to primary texts and data, but also to art, photography, audio materials, and video clips. Students in Carol Rivera-Kron's speech class use the web to deepen their understanding of what makes a speech effective, accessing audio clips from NPR and U.S. Senator Barack Obama's electrifying speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Liz Iannotti has her students at The English Language Center use resources from the Museum of Modern Art. Pat Dillon's nursing students use streaming video of cell division and Flash presentations of fetal development created by the PBS program NOVA. These resources not only help make the learning process more lively and engaging; they also make learning richer, address different learning styles, and open new avenues for exploring difficult issues and concepts.
By broadening access to information, web resources can provide many advantages in promoting student inquiry. At the same time, however, the vast, unfiltered nature of the web can leave students overwhelmed, frustrated, and misinformed. DFL faculty have addressed this problem in several ways. Most introductory-level inquiry activities focus on a set of web resources selected by the teacher. A thoughtful inquiry activity rarely sends students out to scan the thousands of web pages that result from an Internet search; rather, faculty guide students to high quality sites that provide valuable information. Well-constructed inquiry activities do not focus primarily on finding information – rather, they help students focus on examining, analyzing, and using the information to solve problems and engage with significant content. And in this process, students begin to develop the cognitive and technical skills that enable them to deal with larger research processes, critically searching through, examining, and evaluating the information available to them from all sources – in the library, on the web, and through the media.
In her English composition course, Lenore Beaky takes careful aim at this problem. In Beaky's course, students read the novel Memories of a Pure Spring by Duong Thu Huong, and explore the history of the Vietnam War from multiple perspectives as part of their preparation for writing a research essay. As Beaky explains, her web-based inquiry activity grew out of her dissatisfaction with the quality of students' work on the research paper:
The research essay is often the first such assignment that students have been asked to do, and now with the ubiquity of the Internet, that is the first (and it could be the last) place that they go to find material. Left without guidance, students use the Yahoo search engine and find websites of wildly varying quality that they cobble together to produce pastiches of ill-digested materials often of minimal value. I wanted to design a web inquiry activity that would give students practice in reading a website as they read a text, exploring and analyzing that website, and finally evaluating it.
Beaky starts by sending students to a specific site on Vietnamese history, hosted at Vassar College. Students review the site and examine selected historical primary documents hosted there. They discuss the scope and purpose of the site and the issue of perspective. This leads to overall evaluation of the site and the development of a website evaluation rubric. Then they repeat the process with other sites that trace the history of Vietnam. This process begins to pay off when students select their own research topics and, with the help of the Library website and librarians, begin to identify and evaluate websites for use in their research papers. Completing this guided, step-by-step process, students not only write better papers, they also leave the course better prepared for future research and broader inquiry.
To complete the inquiry process, students often create a product, presentation or performance that draws on and demonstrates what they've learned. The research paper is one obvious possibility, but there are many other alternatives as well. Students can solve problems, engage in mock debates or role-playing, create PowerPoint projects or web pages, take part in simulations, or do peer teaching that utilizes multimedia resources. This kind of learning gives students a role and a responsibility for synthesizing information. Students are more likely to do their best work because they are not simply fulfilling an assignment, but participating in a collaborative process of learning and producing work with their classmates. The sense that their work is authentic and valuable adds meaning and motivation and prepares them for the life-long independent learning that is so vital to our larger educational mission.
Online Writing and Dialogue
The web offers a range of new tools for communication: email, threaded discussion, online chat, and video conferencing. The use of online tools for communication and exchange has spread rapidly among DFL faculty. Faculty have experimented with many different tools. At LaGuardia, the threaded Discussion Board available in the Blackboard course management system has become particularly popular.
The vast majority of DFL faculty experiment with online discussions to promote student dialogue and exchange. While in DFL, participants explore the pedagogy of online exchange and the possible uses of Discussion Boards through small and large group conversations, classroom experiments, and reflective writing. As a result, by Spring 2005, thousands of LaGuardia students were using Blackboard each semester. Nearly every one of the activities included in this Sampler – including those shared by Gail Green-Anderson, Sonja Tanner, Jim Giordano, Nancy Gross, Rudy Meangru, Louis Lucca, Liz Clark, Max Rodriguez, Ellen Quish, Mary Beth Early, and Edna Boris – incorporates the use of online discussion.
Marie Sacino from Cooperative Education has discussed the ways that her Discussion Boards expand the time and space students devote to learning, sustaining student connection with each other, and engaging with the issues raised in the course. Sacino and many other faculty have pointed out the ways that Discussion Board assignments can build students' literacy skills. Reading and writing are the crucial elements of Discussion Board activities, and many LaGuardia students need to write and write and write in order to build their confidence, command and fluency.
Many DFL faculty have participated in LaGuardia's Writing in the Disciplines (WID) initiative, an interdisciplinary faculty development program affiliated with the LaGuardia Center for Teaching and Learning and co-led by Professor Marian Arkin, who also co-leads DFL. WID supports LaGuardia faculty members as they integrate writing into their courses, build student skills, and helps faculty use writing as an active learning tool. The DFL-WID collaboration has resulted in a fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas. While exploring the uses of the Discussion Board and other technologies, DFL faculty learn about staged writing projects, responses to student writing, and ways to devise more meaningful and effective writing assignments. Both DFL and WID incorporate the notion of "writing to learn," based on the understanding that the process of writing is a thinking process, one that help students grapple with challenging content and become good critical thinkers as well as better writers.
The online Discussion Board facilitates some key aspects of this process. DFL faculty use the Discussion Board for brainstorming, question generation, free-writing, exchanging first person narratives, building community in the classroom, reporting on research, coordinating group work, sharing drafts of papers and peer critiquing, and encouraging reflection, among other tasks. Through carefully crafted prompts, faculty "stage" writing assignments, enabling students to build their skills over time. Features such as archiving messages, digital forums, and creating threaded posts give students the opportunity to respond to issues raised in class. Students can quote from each other's posts or outside readings, incorporate external links to support their positions, or draw from prior posts in completing more advanced assignments.
Most important is that the online venue creates an intermediate space – not entirely private but not fully public – where students' writing is shared within the boundaries of the class. This is possible without technology, of course, but the Discussion Board makes it much easier to do again and again throughout the class, so that students become comfortable writing for each other, as well as reading and responding to each other's work. This interaction not only elevates the question of audience – a crucial question for beginning writers to grapple with – it also adds motivation for students to strengthen and improve their writing.
Often, the online environment is used to complement in-class activities, sometimes to prepare students in advance, frequently to provide a venue for the continuation of an in-class discussion or activity. Students can break into small online groups to respond to readings, formulate an argument, or even write the script for a role-play. Films, debates, class trips, group discussions, and a range of active learning approaches in class can also kick off online participation from all students. The online discussion can then help form the foundation for future class discussion and course work.
Faculty play an important role in shaping these online discussions, but they don't necessarily respond to every post. The core of online discussion is student-to-student exchange, with the faculty member as a guide. In his experience teaching a course entitled The Bible as Literature using the Discussion Board at LaGuardia, English professor Terry Cole found that his role was shifting:
I was always the host, trying to guide people back to the coursework, but allowing options for students to bring to the course what they thought the course needed, as well as options for future discussion in and out of class.
Faculty experience with online discussion has demonstrated the importance of establishing clear guidelines regarding faculty expectations and student responsibilities (see "Thinking about Online Writing" in Section IV). Most instructors assume the role of a facilitator or moderator, employing a Socratic method of keeping the discussion focused, asking clarifying questions, and summarizing key points made by students to further class discussion.
In the Discussion Board, students are constantly learning from each other, bouncing ideas back and forth, creating their own learning pathways. In response to a "prompt" created by the teacher, usually a short assignment or set of questions (see examples in Section II), students offer answers, ideas, evidence and interpretation. In a successful online discussion, students engage in concrete exchanges with each other; sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing. They articulate their thoughts, become critical readers of each other's work, and seek information to support their positions. In Rudy Meangru's Precalculus class, for example, students explore calculus problems, articulate how they solve them, and provide evidence for how they arrived at their conclusions. "Students share their work, see commonalities in problem-solving, realize when they need help, and reach out to each other to get the help they need," says Meangru. "It's very encouraging to observe students discussing mathematics and forming independent study groups."
Classes like Cole's and Meangru's are utilizing a dialogic pedagogy – a pedagogy that values dialogue as a critical learning process. Building and structuring dialogue among learners, between learners and teachers and between learners and texts, this approach envisions learning as a highly interactive process that values what students already know about their world. Shaped by the work of Paulo Freire, dialogic learning helps students actively create links between their own lived experience – what they already know – and the academic material they encounter. When they make that linkage, they engage in a more meaningful fashion, learn more deeply, and retain more of what they learn after the class is over.
Interestingly, compared to the face-to-face classroom, the online format also seems to provide many students with a safe space to convey ideas and share questions. Due to shyness or cultural factors, some students may feel more comfortable writing on the Discussion Board than speaking up during class. Many DFL faculty have noted the phenomenon reported by English professor Jim Wilson, who described this scene:
I recently used the Group Discussion Board function, which I found very effective . . . One young woman said that she found it particularly valuable because as a shy student, she rarely feels as though she can contribute to a group discussion. This provides her an opportunity to do so.
The experience of DFL faculty and their students suggests that the structure of the Discussion Board allows it to supplement the classroom with a different kind of discussion environment. It is harder for students with loud voices to dominate dialogue that takes place online. Students with quiet voices – including many female students – can be heard. There is room for everyone to take part on a more equal plane.
Surveys conducted with students in courses taught by DFL faculty show that students place a high value on the Discussion Board and feel that it helps them build stronger connections with their faculty and with other students. Faculty report that the Discussion Board environment helps them build community in their classes. "I'm interested in developing a community of learners in each of my courses," notes Humanities faculty member Max Rodriguez. "Urban community college students often have very little time to meet other students, including those in their own majors." In the activity he submitted for this collection, Rodriguez demonstrates the value of careful attention to community-building. For Rodriguez and others, the Discussion Board not only helps students build reading and writing skills and deepen their content knowledge; used well, Rodriguez suggests, it helps faculty "develop and support a community of learners where students see each other as resources, contributing to their own learning."
Student-Authored Multimedia Projects
In the past decade, software for multimedia authoring has improved dramatically. It is now easier than ever before to create multimedia presentations that incorporate text, photographs, color, sound, and moving images. Applications such as PowerPoint are now simple to learn for even technology neophytes. And applications such as Dreamweaver, Movie Maker and Flash allow mid-level users to create vivid and multilayered products that engage the senses as they convey complex messages.
Many DFL faculty have mastered these authoring tools and used them to create their own presentations and websites. (See Section IV for links to over 50 web sites created by LaGuardia faculty, working in collaboration with their Student Technology Mentors.) Perhaps even more significantly, faculty are helping students learn to use these authoring tools to create projects that afford enhanced opportunities for creative expression as students demonstrate and share their learning. These projects range from simple PowerPoint presentations to digital storytelling projects and electronic student portfolios. LaGuardia students in a wide range of classes are now using digital cameras, tape recorders and simple, widely available software to author their own presentations. For example: intermediate ESL students in Jennifer Horton Benichou's class developed PowerPoint presentations to demonstrate what they had learned about recognizing and dealing with stress; in Erika Heppner's Oral Communication for the Non-Native Speaker course, students wrote and performed scripts for a radio show that was posted to the course web site.
Many of these projects grow out of and/or serve as the outcome of web-based inquiry. Students use the web to research a topic and build the content knowledge they need. Then they use multimedia tools to present what they have learned. In his Principles of Marketing class, Jim Giordano's students do a case study project, examining a business that has a marketing problem. They use library database resources to research external forces affecting the market and come up with a marketing solution, which they present to the class, using PowerPoint. Prabha Betne's Elementary Statistics students also use the library databases and web-based inquiry in their projects, exploring and presenting the lives of famous mathematicians. "I believe that learning the how and why underlying the development of mathematical principles helps students master the subject," writes Betne. The biographical research, which Betne says "was only possible with the use of technology," led to creative and content-rich projects, which Betne felt "motivated students to learn and encouraged them to find ways to apply what they were learning about their subjects to the entire course curriculum."
Sherrell Powell is a senior faculty member in the Occupational Therapy program who had little experience with technology before DFL. But she decided to ask students in the OT class on physical and developmental disability to do projects that put what she calls "a new twist" on developing the treatment plan. Powell asked her students to research and create a presentation to familiarize stroke victims and their families with the issues they might face in home care. "I developed the activity in this format because I believed that these students were tired of doing a traditional treatment plan and wanted to explore other options," she explains. "I also chose this format as a result of standards set up by the Accreditation Council for Occupational Therapy Education, which requires that OT students be able to disseminate information to their clients and clients' families through the use of technology."
Powell spent considerable time working on this activity before the semester began, learning how to create PowerPoint presentations, identifying research resources on the web, and planning the activity. This course, she explains, is normally lecture-based, and shifting the approach required careful thought. She wanted her students to engage in treatment planning that involved inquiry and analysis, problem solving, and communication. In the end, she was enthusiastic about the student projects and what she felt was the high quality of student learning:
I learned that information can be taught in a variety of ways. I was concerned that the students would have difficulty with the concept of using technology as a vehicle to present occupational therapy information to the general public, and also with putting together a presentation that would be beneficial to the client and family and also of a professional quality. The students were able to meet the challenge and incorporated their unique styles into the final presentations.
Powell's experience highlights the pedagogical aspect of these projects. While building on inquiry approaches, these projects also incorporate a pedagogy of student-centered active learning, also known as constructivism.
As a pedagogy, constructivism builds on some common sense principles that many teachers know well, expressed in a familiar saying:
I hear and I forget
I see and I remember
I do and I understand
This simple formulation articulates the essence of active learning: when students are active, when they "do," their learning is more powerful and meaningful. To this, constructivism adds a new way of understanding cognition and knowledge formation. A traditional view of knowledge formation, that Paulo Freire called the "banking theory of knowledge," assumes that knowledge is a thing that the teacher has and the students do not. The teacher is full and the students are empty. The teacher's role is to "deposit" his or her knowledge into the students, and fill them up with it. The students' role is to receive this new knowledge, to be filled. A constructivist view of knowledge, in contrast, suggests that cognition is a more active process for the learner, and that knowledge emerges from a social process that requires engagement. Both students and teachers come to the classroom with pre-existing knowledge. The role of the constructivist teacher is to design effective processes that involve resources and experiences that allow students to build on, deepen, revise, reorganize and share their understandings.
The literature on constructivism is widespread, reaching from Dewey and Piaget to Vygotsky and beyond. In an article in Science Education, "Constructivist Perspectives on Science and Mathematics Learning," G.H. Wheatley concludes that the first principle of constructivism is that "knowledge is not passively received but is actively built up by the [learner] … That is, as much as we would like to, we cannot put ideas into students' heads; they will and must construct their own meanings." This does not mean, however, that the constructivist teacher merely accepts students' pre-existing knowledge as the final word. In the landmark study, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience & School, published by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, authors John Bransford, Ann L. Brown and Rodney Cocking explain that:
A logical extension of the view that new knowledge must be constructed from existing knowledge is that teachers need to pay attention to the incomplete understandings…and naïve renditions of concepts that learners bring with them to a given subject. Teachers then need to build on these ideas in ways that help each student achieve a more mature understanding. If the students' initial ideas and beliefs are ignored, the understandings they develop can be very different from what the teacher intends.
Reviewing and synthesizing the scientific literature on cognition, Bransford and his colleagues discussed recent advances in the understanding of five key areas related to learning: 1) memory and the structure of knowledge; 2) problem-solving and reasoning; 3) the early foundations of learning; 4) regulatory processes that govern learning, including metacognition, and 5) how symbolic thinking emerges from the culture and community of the learner. Based on these advances, Bransford focuses our attention not only on the process of engaging with students' prior knowledge, but also on the importance of two other factors: a) students taking ownership of the process of re-organizing their learning into new understandings (what he calls "sense-making" activities), and b) helping students to think more consciously about their own learning processes, defined as the "metacognitive stage."
DFL faculty have found that applying these findings to the classroom offers rich benefits for students. By addressing and building upon the knowledge students bring to the classroom, a constructivist approach helps students engage with new material and concepts. At the same time, it can encourage them to share and rethink what they know from their communities and their lived experiences. Connecting new ideas to older ones and actively re-organizing their new insights into cohesive conceptual patterns helps students integrate and retain their learning. Moreover, this approach can also empower students to learn from each other as well as the teacher, transforming the class into a community of learner-teachers who all have something to contribute.
A constructivist pedagogy encourages inquiry and dialogue. It also embraces strategies that prompt students to create projects that share their learning with others, including students, friends, and family. The activities created by DFL faculty demonstrate ways that this pedagogy can guide the classroom use of multimedia tools, from PowerPoint to Dreamweaver, and can produce exciting results.
Multimedia authoring tools enable students to author presentations that integrate evolving combinations of text, image, narration, and music. These combinations can make presentations more engaging and multilayered for the viewer; at the same time, they ask the student author to think in more sophisticated ways about medium and message in communication. Multimedia projects also raise questions about audience. Most student research papers are written only for the teacher. But a multimedia project almost always is designed to communicate to a broader audience – the class, the college, or a specific public, such as the families of stroke victims that Sherrell Powell's students had in mind. Having an audience not only adds motivation to the communication process, it also makes it more meaningful and authentic. "Students are motivated to learn when they are involved in a creative project that results in a product they can share with their classmates and their friends and family," concluded Erika Heppner, after experimenting with multimedia production in her Oral Communications for the Non-Native Speaker class. Jim Giordano came to similar conclusions after asking his students to create and present case study projects using PowerPoint. While the research was fundamental, the presentation process was key, he found. Since the projects are seen by other students, Giordano found:
Students wanted to do well. The individuals and teams have taken ownership of their work, demonstrating increased pride in their accomplishments. This has also resulted in each student paying closer attention to his or her own project, and to their classmates' case studies.
Other projects found throughout this volume illustrate the exciting potential of this combination of pedagogy and technology. Teaching in very different contexts, Sonja Tanner of Humanities and Elizabeth Iannotti of The English Language Center both used the resources of the Museum of Modern Art as the basis for exemplary activities that involved student-authored multimedia projects. Seeking to build students' English skills, Iannotti's carefully scaffolded assignment asked students to research the history and meaning of particular pieces of art and create multimedia presentations that they shared with their classmates. Meanwhile, in her Critical Thinking class, Tanner asked students to imagine themselves as curators involved in designing an exhibition called "What is Modern Art?" Working in groups, the students explored museum web sites, selected artwork that illustrated something quintessential about modern art, and then built a multimedia argument for their selection, using text, images, and sound. Finally, each group used PowerPoint to present their argument to the rest of the class, who acted as the Board of Trustees, making final selections of the art that was most appropriate and meaningful. As Tanner explains:
Initially unsure as to how students would respond to this new activity, I was again surprised by their enthusiasm for learning and working with technology. The visual medium of Blackboard, PowerPoint and online inquiry were particularly effective in this project, as they formed a motivational, hands-on collaborative foundation, on which students then developed the abstract concept of modern art. Students got caught up in selecting images as examples of this concept, and then were asked to find the common conceptual ground among, perhaps, a Picasso, a Schiele, and a Rothko. Since this was a critical thinking project, my concerns lay not so much in how well the project teaches students technology skills as in how well it fosters critical thinking abilities. Technology in this project enabled multi-dimensional stages in which students learned to recognize various perspectives and the reasons supporting each; to see critically and form abstract concepts dialectically, shifting back and forth from particular examples to the general, essential properties that these particular examples have in common. While these abilities can certainly be fostered without extensive use of technology, its incorporation enriched the process and simultaneously taught complementary skills.
Tanner's activity, like that of Iannotti, Powell and others, illustrates the ways that DFL faculty use technology and constructivist pedagogy to achieve central goals of their courses – in Tanner's case, the development of students' critical thinking skills, and in Iannotti's the improvement of students' English speaking skills. Always, DFL faculty tailor their use of technology to address the particular issues and outcomes identified as central to their students.
DFL faculty engaged in building students' literacy and communication skills have explored the potential of digital storytelling. Two examples are included in the Sampler. Digital storytelling invites students to create multimedia narratives about important topics. Many digital stories involve personal narratives, helping students become more conscious of their own growth as learners at the same time that they build important skills. Teaching Oral Communication for the Non-Native Speaker, Erika Heppner had students work in groups to prepare and record stories on topics ranging from work and marriage to health and popular culture. These stories were then posted to a course website and used to help students further improve their oral communication skills. Playing the files posted on the web, students listened to other students and talked about what they did and did not understand. "When they don't understand a particular student, we can talk about why. I think this sort of analysis has helped them think about their own pronunciation." Heppner explained, and then added, "In the spirit of the college's ePortfolio project, we'll be able to listen to the progress students make in their spoken English."
Teaching a workplace-based ESL class for adults, Elizabeth Riker chose a different medium, having her students write, direct, and produce small digital movies, using QuickTime software. The students selected important stories about their own lives and thought about what they would want to tell others. Then they worked on scripts and thought about ways to utilize visual as well as audio narrative.
The primary motivation for embarking on this project was to provide an opportunity for students to communicate their stories. The secondary motivation was to help students create a very personal product that they could share with family and friends. As the project came together, people became more and more eager to share their stories…. Had the technology been absent from the project, I think a great deal of the dynamism of sharing the projects would have been lost for the students. This was something new and original. Using the digital format as opposed to pencil and paper made the results richer.
Constructivist teachers look for ways to help students make connections between academic content and their lived experience, and to become more aware of their own processes and growth as learners. The college as a whole has made this an important focus through its ePortfolio project.
LaGuardia's ePortfolio project is innovative and far-reaching, and has too many elements to be discussed fully in this volume. Yet it is worth noting how the ePortfolio builds on the constructivist approaches explored in DFL. An ePortfolio is a collection of student work and their reflections on that work, stored and presented to select publics through the mechanisms of the web. It provides students and faculty with a series of snapshots of student learning, a learning history that can help students study and take greater responsibility for their own growth as self-directed learners. Scores of LaGuardia faculty are experimenting with ePortfolio, and the college is committed to making this opportunity available to all LaGuardia students.
ePortfolios and other constructivist approaches to multimedia authoring raise a host of interesting questions about ways to help students consider the implications of sharing their work and their stories with other students. There is much educational and social value in the process of sharing their insights. But students also need to consider carefully what information they want to make public and what should remain private. In her article for this collection, English Professor J. Elizabeth Clark shares her approach to this question. "I understand the intense power of narrative and the ways in which the digital medium can enhance narrative," Clark explains. "I'm interested in engaging students in informed inquiries around narrative content and guiding them toward making responsible decisions."
As a part of her effort to help students consider the issues of public writing and private writing, Clark has her students examine a collection of student ePortfolios and digital stories from other colleges, including Penn State, Kalamazoo College, and Maricopa Community College. Then students reflect on what they saw, considering questions such as: "What did you learn about the authors of these [ePortfolio] sites? If you were an employer, would you be interested in hiring this person? Why or why not? If you were an admissions counselor, for a four year school, would you admit this person? If you were a family member or friend, what would interest you about this site?"
Clark’s students go on to examine other personal memoirs, poetry, and web logs, and to consider the issues of personal risk-taking and what gives power to personal narrative. In one assignment, students write about "My Boundaries: What Kinds of Information I Want to Share in My ePortfolio – and Why." Clark notes:
What I think is useful about this activity is engaging students in an exploration of public writing available on the web. When students are confronted with the personal nature of other students' photographs and confessions, they begin to unwrap the complicated nature of creative non-fiction and autobiographical writing. I think it's useful to engage students in activities that help them think of the public presentation of themselves in conjunction with their academic, professional, and personal goals.
The ePortfolio project, the digital storytelling projects, and other activities guided by constructivist pedagogy seek to engage with students' lives, experiences and prior knowledge as a way of deepening their learning. As students create multimedia presentations and websites, they are learning and integrating new content understandings in courses ranging from English and history to mathematics and occupational therapy. At the same time, they are learning to master new communication tools. It is particularly exciting to see how DFL faculty are figuring out ways to guide LaGuardia students – urban and overwhelmingly working class, immigrant and female – as they master the tools needed to create new digital content. If the Digital Divide of the 21st century is less about access and more about content – who authors the content of the World Wide Web – LaGuardia is helping to develop a new generation of multimedia authors: skilled, thoughtful, and engaged in the exciting process of reshaping the next wave of the world's digital culture.
Conclusion: Learning about Teaching, Learning about Learning
The activities collected in this Sampler suggest the creativity of LaGuardia faculty and the thoughtful ways they have applied active learning pedagogies to take advantage of the opportunities offered by new digital technologies. But the process of experimentation and invention is far from over. New faculty, new students, and new technologies will continue to prompt new approaches.
DFL faculty are engaged in an on-going process of learning – learning about technology, learning about teaching, learning about learning. DFL supports faculty as they take on the role of teacher-learners. "Before participating in the Designed for Learning project," explains Lenore Beaky, "I was highly dissatisfied with the materials that students found in their web searches, but I lacked the confidence that I could help them find and use better sources. We need to meet our students where they are, and after Designed for Learning, I felt much more knowledgeable about locating, reading, and using effective web materials myself, and therefore confident about giving students practice in doing the same."
The process of faculty learning goes well beyond learning new technology skills to focus on the issues of pedagogy and the ways students learn. Gail Green-Anderson's reflection at the end of her first year working with DFL epitomizes the thoughtful ways DFL faculty take on the role as learner teachers:
Because teaching with technology brought about positive changes – very quickly – in my classes, I found myself stepping back and reflecting on my pedagogy. I found myself asking why I employed certain approaches and why I wasn't trying others. I found myself more able to relinquish some control based on activities set in concrete. I learned a few things: online conversation as a prelude or response to other assignments bolsters student performance on those assignments; I work better as a facilitator than a director; good equipment in comfortably designed spaces and heightened access to information can make people who come from impoverished educational settings feel "rich." I would not have come to these insights were it not for DFL. The support and inspiration provided by leaders and colleagues pushed me to reflect in a way that I wasn't doing alone in the classroom. . . DFL has renewed me as a teacher.
Teaching and technology. Pedagogical insight derived from classroom practice. Student learning and faculty learning. At LaGuardia, the DFL faculty have demonstrated the power of these connections. We offer this collection as a document to their work thus far, and a support to the future of innovation.