Gail Desler's ePortfolio
Artifacts from the Digital Frontier
Artifact One: History in the Raw – Teaching with Primary Sources
"The instructional role of history educators and school library medial specialists is being influenced not only by advances in technology but also by economic, educational, and employment changes. Faced with expanded access and increased storage and retrieval capabilities in an electronic environment, we are fast discovering how obsolete our former methods of instruction have become and how particularly limiting the textbook-lecture-classroom approach is to learning in the new electronic age."
Kathleen Craver
Personal Reflection Statement:
Our newly adopted state frameworks and content standards in history-social science require that students develop the skills to identify and handle primary sources. Before grade 6, students should be able to “differentiate between primary and secondary sources,” and to “pose relevant questions about events encountered in historical documents…letters, diaries, artifacts, photos…” By the end of high school, students should be able to “evaluate and employ information from multiple primary and secondary sources” and then “apply it in oral and written presentations.” In adapting these standards, the State Board of Education is inviting our students to “do” history, to assume the role of historians.
By mandating that students work with primary sources, the state is encouraging our students “not to just study history, but to investigate it.” (Podany, 1997) While it has always made sense to allow our students to construct meaning in history the same way historians do – by going to the sources, it has not been until the arrival of the Internet that teachers and students could easily access primary sources. It never occurred to me during my k-12 years to question what was published in a textbook. Somehow lectures and textbooks failed, and continue to fail, to help students develop the historian’s thinking skills.
My personal journey in learning how to think historically began two years ago when I attended the UCLA History and Technology Institute. I was given an article to read by Robert Bain, “Into the Breach: Using Research and Theory to Shape History Instruction.” Bain pointed out the gap between the way history is viewed at the university level as a “’discipline,’ a unique way of knowing the world that professionals shared” and the way history is generally taught in k-12 where history is a “subject” that teachers teach and students learn.(Bain, 1998) Bain’s proposal that the crucial first step in our teaching has to be “to problematize the concept of ‘history’ and challenge students’ view of the discipline as ‘merely-facts-beamed-through-time’” inspired me to rethink the teaching of history. I wanted my students to see history as in interpretive account subject to change, rather as a series of static facts from the past.
Energized by the UCLA project, I applied and was accepted to the Library of Congress American Memory Project, a summer institute designed to give teachers access to our nation’s library and its growing collection of digitized primary documents. My goal was to develop a unit on Japanese internment suitable for 5th graders. Since I teach in the Elk Grove School District, I wanted to develop a unit that would show my students that history does not just happen in a vacuum or a history book, it happens in their community. A compelling and important chapter of World War II is told through the history of Elk Grove, which had a large and very successful population of Japanese-American farmers at the outbreak of the war. In November the Library of Congress notified me they had reviewed, approved and posted my lesson, Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself, to the American Memory site.
I am currently in the middle of teaching this lesson for the second time. What I like about my lesson is that the students walk away from it with an understanding that history is “messy,” that it is often written is a very selective way, and that its events can and must be viewed from multiple perspectives. More importantly, I hope that they walk away from their investigation of Nothing to Fear inspired to think deeply and creatively about historical events.
Faculty Review:
- Bruce McVicker (CSUS) – Nothing to Fear…is an excellent example of how the use of the Internet, combined with insightful lesson design and integration, can assist learners in meaningful investigations of past events.
Peer Review:
- David Delongchamp (iMET Cohort) – “This is a very complete lesson. You did a good job of finding all the resources that really added to the interest of the site.”
Reflection:
I chose Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself as one of my artifacts not only because it invites students to revisit historical events, raise important questions, and challenge stories told from one perspective only. In teaching this unit for a second time, the only thing I have changed is the scoring guide. From the rather generic one included with the lesson, I have developed one the states more specifically what students must include in their final product in order to meet or surpass the standards. Using scoring guides to raise student performance is the focus of my second artifact.
Artifact Two – Catapulting Students to the Standards
“The promise of the standards movement will accomplish nothing if it does not lead to changes in the classroom, school, and district.”
Douglas B. Reeves
Personal Reflection Statement:
Anyone visiting my classroom or most any other classroom at my site might sense that we are “in training.” Indeed, with Stanford 9 testing less than a month away, my colleagues and I are feeling the “top-down” pressure that test scores need to improve.
Although district, state, and national standards currently drive our curriculum, “test-prep” talk and exercises dominate April’s classroom activities. In a nutshell, we are preparing our students to take multiple-choice tests. We are trapped in a race to “beat” teachers from other schools within and outside our district – or at least to higher scores than 50% of them.
As a teacher in a low achieving school, I embrace the standards because they are linked to high expectations for all children. The standards are an opportunity to take all students to a higher achievement level. But in order to help my students reach the standards, I must put a time limit on how much time and weight is given to training for multiple-choice tests. I need to provide my students with tasks and challenges that are tied to the standards and require critical thinking skills.
A crucial step in helping students meet the standards is taking a second look at how we structure and assess our student projects and learning. Given the almost unlimited access to information our students now have via the Internet, it makes no sense to assign them to “write a report about … Our students need opportunities to use information meaningfully – to think, analyze, evaluate and invent (Valenza, 2000).” David Thornburg urges teachers to develop standards-based lessons that are project-based and engage students – taking them way beyond “write a report about…” He predicts that the result of project-based curriculum will be the “death of education as ‘trivial pursuit.’ He anticipates the day that we no longer approach learning and assessment as a game of Jeopardy in which we judge intelligence by our students’ ability to “memorize decontextualized tidbits of information (Thornburg, 2000).” Thornburg explains that by immersing our students in learning that is contextual, learning is more likely to be retained – and that practitioners of project-based learning will ultimately have the satisfaction of watching standardized test scores improve.
As an early adopter of problem-based curriculum, I have written a number of lessons that seemed to engage students in the learning process. Where I have struggled is in the area of assessment. Although I was providing my students with opportunities for collaboration and active learning, I often failed to provide them with the scaffolding necessary to meet the targeted standards. My generic rubrics did not provide students with a clear plan for meeting standards, and often left me wondering why I was not getting the desired results. Last summer I had the opportunity to attend the Institute for Leadership in Assessment and Accountability sponsored by the Center for Performance Assessment and directed by Douglas Reeves. This five-day institute provided me with the structure and experiences Linda Darling-Hammond prescribes for promoting teacher learning that supports student learning: “Teachers learn best by studying, doing, and reflecting; by collaborating with other teachers; by looking closely at students and their work; and by sharing what they see.(Darling-Hammond, 1998)” I left the institute ready to rethink assessment of student projects.
In the fall, I began developing a language arts/social studies unit for 4th, 5th, and 6th graders: Passages – An African-American Odyssey. My goal was to develop performance assessments that would guide students to meeting or exceeding the standards. Two of my colleagues, a 4th grade and a 6th grade teacher, agreed to have their classes join my 5th class in the Passages unit. I welcomed the opportunity to recreate the collegial environment of the Institute at my own site and very much valued the opportunities for feedback, reflection, and growth I know would result from our collaborative efforts.
As I designed each task, I referred back often to the excellent resource binder Doug Reeves developed for the Institute participants with its practical scoring guide strategies: 1) specificity in a scoring guide is critical 2) scoring guide must be clearly linked to standards and tasks 3) scoring guides must be created for each task rather then the culminating product. As the three of us introduced the tasks, we made sure that our students were familiar with the performance criteria before beginning each task. As our students delved into the project, we frequently referred to the criteria. A continual dialogue developed between the three of us and with our students as to what really took a product from “Proficient” to “Exemplary.”
Although scoring performance assessments will always be more time consuming that multiple-choice tests, clear rubrics will make the task easier – and students will want to know when they can take their assessments home, unlike the multiple-choice test they will deposit in the trash can as they exit my class.
How my students will do on this year’s round of Stanford 9 testing remains to be seen. But if their scores in reading and language arts improve, there will be no doubt in mind it had much more to do with their level of involvement with the Passages unit and other project-based units than with our daily 15-minute “bubbling in” sessions.
Faculty Review:
- John Burns (History-Social Science Consultant - California Department of Education) - “I thoroughly enjoyed looking at you ‘Passages’ unit for grades 4-5-6. The web presentation is colorful, well organized, easy to use, graphically appealing and interesting. A principal strength of the unit is the integration of language arts and history-social science standards. All of us realize that time pressures in the elementary school schedule often put history-social science subject matter at a disadvantage. Too often it is ignored completely. The vehicle of storytelling offers rich possibilities to promote achievement in language arts while engaging students at the same time in highly important subject content. This type of approach should be emulated. I also liked the ready availability of both a student page and teacher notes, and I thought the "Ask an expert" section was intriguing, though I wonder how effective it is. The summary rationale for the unit outlined in the first teacher note was very clear. I also liked that there are a number of links to follow in executing the unit.
The one section that could be strengthened is the connection to grade 6 standards. While the "fit" is not as close as it is with grades 4 and 5, I do think a content relationship exists, not just the skills connection. Content standard 6.2.9 calls on students to trace the evolution of language through study of civilizations including Kush. Storytelling is a timeless element in language and communication, and parts of Kush included sub-Saharan Africa, so I think you could establish a content relationship there. Well done overall!!
- Nancy DePlatchett (Curriculum Specialist, ARTSEDGE, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C.) – “We have gone through your site and we are very impressed. What an incredible project. We would like to not it some way on our site so that teachers are aware of it and the wonderful resources it contains. Please let us know if this is possible.”
Peer Review:
- Marco Baeza (iMET) – “If the target audience is children, then it needs to be more engaging. Perhaps animation and sound could be included as well as samples of student work.”
- Maria Gutierrez-Stearne – “Great color choices. Excellent layout -- clear and easy to follow as well as visually pleasing to the eye. Love the quotes! Well chosen images. Optional – captions to identify some of the pictures/images would be a nice extra; they are interesting and I bet not all students know
Reflection:
After having the opportunity to view a unit developed by fellow iMETTER Marco Baeza, I am inspired to revisit Passages and scan in student artwork to make the pages more visually appealing to 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. I will also add captions to all images, as per Maria’s suggestion. When I reteach this unit in the fall, I will incorporate John Burn’s suggestion to show the link between the 6th grade Language Arts Standards and the storytelling activities.
Artifact 3 – Celebrating Diversity
“Multicultural education assumes that the future of our society is pluralistic. It proposes to restore and fulfill the promise made in the establishment of public schools: to prepare all young people for full participation in the economy and in the democratic community. It also proposes to validate the humanity and cultural life of diverse peoples.”
Duane E. Campbell, Choosing Democracy(Campbell, 1996)
“Educational excellence is unattainable for any student when certain groups are denied a fair chance to receive the highest quality education possible and when some contributions are systematically excluded for the U.S and human stories.”
Geneva Gay, Keynote Speech, 7th Annual Multicultural Education Conference, CSUS, March 3, 2001
Personal Reflection Statement:
It is my privilege and choice to teach in a school that is ethnically, racially, and economically diverse. In developing curriculum for my 5th graders, I seek topics and resources that will engage and validate my students. I know that many of my students look through the pages of our district-adopted history textbook only to see where they are not. Because I cannot always find ready-made units to fill in the gaps for my students, I have started developing lessons with the goal of encouraging students to question their textbooks and to investigate history.
In reviewing the literature, I have found a variety of definitions for multiculturalism. The common thread running through these definitions is that in a global society, all children can benefit from experiencing diversity outside of their environment. Sleeter and Grant state that the “ideology of Multicultural Education is one of social change – not simply an integration into society of people who have been left out, but a change in the very fabric of that society (Sleeter, 1999).” Geneva Gay, faculty associate of the Center for Multicultural Education at the University of Washington-Seattle, is waiting for the promise of social change in our nation’s schools to become a reality (Gay, 1994).
James Banks, who researches and teaches with Geneva Gay at the Center for Multicultural Education, has identified five dimensions of multicultural education: content integration, the knowledge construction process, prejudice reduction, an equity pedagogy, and an empowering school culture and social structure (Banks). The first dimension, content integration, is at the heart of the artifacts I am including in this section: Passages – An African-American Odyssey, The Road to California, and Nubia – the Other Egypt. My goal is to provide educational experiences that are perceived as personally meaningful to my students. My goal is also to go beyond the “flavor of the month” approach to multicultural curricula that Banks describes as “Contributions Approach.” Schools that limit their lessons on minority cultures to Martin Luther King’s birthday and Cinco de Mayo celebrations reinforce the still prevalent concept that ethnic minorities are not central to mainstream U.S. society (Banks).
While I do not believe my classroom practices have ever supported the “Contributions Approach,” I have struggled to get beyond the “Additive Approach” in which “special units on ethnic and cultural groups are added to the curriculum, such as units on African Americans in the West, Indian Removal, and the Internment of the Japanese Americans (Banks).” Part of getting past the “Additive Approach” is doing the education piece with administration and the general public. By scheduling a student celebration of my Passages unit in February, for example, I was actually promoting the idea that this unit was merely our contribution to Black History month. My principal was quick to come onboard and recognize that the unit was part of a year-long program to provide my students with a different lens for viewing immigration. The reporter from a local newspaper had a more difficult time understanding the year-long theme concept. But then, she arrived looking for a story on how schools celebrated Black History Month, and that is the story she chose to write.
Banks’ “Transformation Approach” is my ultimate goal in lesson development. This approach “brings content about ethnic and cultural groups from the margin to the center of the curriculum (Banks).” My focus is no longer on a particular group, but rather a historical event or issue. The purpose of my lessons is to provide students with opportunities to view such events as the American Revolution, the Gold Rush, Westward Movement, and Civil Rights from multiple perspectives. I share in James Banks’ belief that “When students learn content about the nation and the world from the perspectives of the diverse groups that shaped historical and contemporary events, they will be better able to participate in personal, social, and civic actions that are essential for citizens in a
democratic pluralistic society(Banks).” I embrace multicultural education as an opportunity to share all our stories.
Note: the following reviews and reflection are for Nubia – the Other Gift of the Nile and Road to California. Passages was reviewed in Artifact Two.
Faculty Review:
- Dr. Lorie Hammond, Director of Middle Grounds Student Teaching Cohort (CSUS) – “The Road to California is a beautiful lesson. I look forward to having you share this unit with our student teachers.”
- Peg Hill (SCORE Project) – “I took a look at the site on Nubia and am awestruck by your work. The scoring guides and the transcribed documents will make the project extremely valuable for teachers and will be a model for teaching PBL… Congratulations and thank you for filling such a huge void in the curriculum. I want to send it to Stan Burstein for his review. He is probably responsible for Kush being in the Framework and Standards, so he needs to see that someone has done something great with it.”
Peer Review:
- Christy Speed – “Great project. I used Nubia- the Other Egypt with my students”
- Deborah Hutchins – “Please send me the URL for the Nubia project. The sixth grade teacher at my site would like to use it.
Reflection:
I began developing the Nubia project as an extension of my Passages unit. When fellow iMETTER Cathie Conforti joined me in the venture, the lesson came together very quickly. We are both committed to reteaching the unit next year. Since Cathie teaches in at a fairly high performing, affluent suburban school, and I teach in fairly low- performing, low income school, we are interested in taking a closer look at the impact this lesson has on our two very different student populations.
References
Bain, R. B. (1998). Into the Breach: Using Research and Theory to Shape History Instruction. Paper presented at the Spencer Foundation History Learning Conference, Pittsburgh, PA.
Banks, J. A.Multicultural Education: Goals and Dimensions, [Internet]. Center for Multicultural Education, University of Washington. Available: http://depts.washington.edu/centerme/view.htm [2001, May 6, 2001].
Campbell, D. (1996). Choosing Democracy - A Practical Guide to Melticultual Education (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
Darling-Hammond, L. (1998). Teacher Learning That Supports Student Learning, [Internet]. Edutopia. Available: http://glef.org/edutopia/newsletters/6.2/darling.html [2000, July, 21, 2000].
Gay, G. (1994). A Synthesis of Scholarship in Multicultral Education, [Internet]. North Central Regional Educational Laboratory. Available: http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/educatrs/leadrshp/le0gay.htm [2001, April 15, 2001].
Podany, A. (1997). Using Primary Sources in the Study of History. History-Social Science Framework for California Public Schools(1997 Updated Edition), 4.
Sleeter, C. E. & G., Carl A. (1999). Making Choices for Multicultural Education (3rd ed.). New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Thornburg, D. (2000, 2000). Renaissance 2000, [Internet]. Thornburg Center. Available: http://www.tcpd.org [2001.
Valenza, J. (2000). For the Best Answers, Ask Tough Questions, [Internet]. Philidephia Enquirer. Available: http://www.joycevalenza.com/questions.html [April 20,
