Description of Project

I initally proposed a Cultural Pen-Pals Email Exchange Project between students in a Gwinnett County Middle School, and students in a foreign country.  Concurrently, I was performing my internship at Five Forks Middle School, under the supervision of Mrs. Anglada, the media specialist.  Mrs. Anglada was born in Puerto Rico, and offered her services to establish contact with Department of Education personnel in Puerto Rico.  Together, we met with a 6th grade Social Studies teacher, Mrs. Gardiner.  She had conducted an interstate pen-pal exchange via snail mail, and was very interested in an international email version.  Mrs. Gardiner indicated that her sixth-graders would be studying the Caribbean in late March,  which seemed to give us enough time to develop the project.   We decided to use  just one class as a "pilot project", and Mrs. Gardiner selected the group of students that meets with her on Mondays and Fridays for a 40 minute period of "Academic Enrichment".  There was not enough time within the regular Social Studies curriculum to implement this project in the actual Caribbean unit of study.

Goals & Objectives

Description of Students

Implementation

Evaluation

    Final Survey Results

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Final Reflection

As I outlined in my powerpoint presentation (linked at Evaluation above), the project should take place within the unit of study, such as Social Studies, not in Academic Enrichment.  I realize that this seems contrary to Freire's (Shor, 1993) idea that a teacher should not be authoritarian (and grades are an authoritarian tool), but I believe that the students need the motivation of grades to stay focused on project goals.   However, Mrs. Gardiner observed that since this was a pilot project, perhaps it was good for the students to learn about the activities on think.com in a non-threatening environment.  

I also experienced real life application of the skills/process debate referred to in Delpit's (1988) article;  at first I directed the students to "explore think.com", to learn about it on their own (process), to experience some of the adventure that Gatto (2001) believes our children should have in education.  But it became apparent that I needed to teach them the specific skills required to utilize all the tools that think.com offered, and then remain close by as the "guide on the side" to help keep them focused on their adventurous forays into international virtual connections.  Without having yet read the article about Freire by Shor, I was following Freirean pedagogy by trying to give them a chance to "experience education as something they do, not as something that's done for them"1

The other future changes that I outlined in my  powerpoint, such as  "better collaboration required to determine specific cross-curriculum standards that can be addressed using think.com, and better planning needed to address auxiliary goals" direct me to look back at two of my other Instructional Technology courses:  Instructional Design and Emerging Perspectives in Teaching and Learning.   This experience has taught me, a non-teacher certified media specialist, the value of actually designing a lesson from start to finish, in order to provide the framework to establish the collaboration, the steps to achieve each objective, and to define the responsibilities of all involved.

I realize that I was lucky to have learned about think.com.  Without it, I may have had nothing to offer the students when the email exchange proposal failed.  If I were to try an email cultural exchange project in the future, I would ensure that I was in regular electronic contact with a teacher first, before introducing the students to the idea.  I would make sure that we were on the same side of the digital divide, as described by Warschauer (2002).  As he pointed out, it's not just the lack of physical access to computers that creates the divide, it is the lack of resources to learn how to use the computers productively.  Even when Mrs. R in Puerto Rico did get to a computer, which wasn't often, her skill level and comfort level, indeed, it seemed to me, even her desire to get to a computer to try to restablish contact with me, or to register with think.com, was insufficient for the purposes of this project.  And the many times I tried to contact her by phone, I wasn't sure if it was that her phone was turned off, or that cell phone service to Puerto Rico is unreliable.   I can't help thinking about what Shor and Freire (1987) said, that "education is politics"2.  Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, but it sure doesn't seem to be helping the Puerto Rican public education system any.  As any good constructivist project should, this inspires me to another research project:  the relationship between the U.S. Government and the Puerto Rican public school system.

I was guided by Sleetor's (1994) article when I developed my goals for this project.   In reviewing his article recently, I believe my project stands up well against some of his observations.  He described a junior high study where students used the word "boring" to describe instruction.  In my final survey, only one of the 18 students surveyed described think.com as "boring".  Sleetor also referred to an incident in a different junior high school to make a point that students need "to develop visual, aural, or tactile imagery"3 about the country they are studying.  I believe that interacting with students from other countries in think.com does give students that opportunity, and expands upon it with the "interact" tools and email capability.

1.  Shor 1993:26
2.  Shor and Freire 1987:46
3.  Sleetor 1994:21

  

References

Gatto, J. T. (2001). Against school: How public education cripples our kids, and why. [HTML]

Shor, I. (1993). Education is politics: Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy.

Delpit, L.D., (1988). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people's children. Harvard Review, 3.

Warschauer, M. (2002). Reconceptualizing the digital divide [HTML].

Sleeter, C. E. & Grant, C. A. (1994). Making choices for multicultural education: Five approaches to race class and gender. [PDF]

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