EDU+581+Teaching+Philosophy

=Teaching with Technology=

Amity Beane University of Maine, Farmington EDU 581/July 2008 History, Philosophy, and Ethics of Education Dr. Sue Thorson

//ABSTRACT//
This paper examines my teaching philosophy from a philosophical standpoint. I explain how my own experiences have influenced my teaching, and how my practice has evolved into a postmodern framework in order for students to make meaning. I address how real learning involves experience, audience, collaboration, creative expression, community, and action.

//BODY//
What constitutes real learning? For what purpose are students in school? I have several ideas, which include experience, collaboration, creative expression, audience, community, and action. My ideas are shaped by my own experience and can be related to the great ideas in education expressed by the Modernists Elisabeth and Alexis Ferm, the progressivist John Dewey, the constructionist Seymour Papert, and the work of Loris Malaguzzi. I am also influenced by Gardner's multiple intelligence theory and the Modernist dancer, Martha Graham.

I was raised in a large, blended family. From the earliest I can remember, my family farmed. I was responsible for working as part of a greater team to ensure the efficient operation of the farm. Everyone, no matter how young or how old, was part of this team effort. I was valued as a contributor, even if my contributions were small. My work was actual physical labor that had tangible, quantifiable results. Not only was there work to be done on the farm, but there were problems to be solved, often in collaboration among the family.

From ages 5-10, my parents schooled me at home. This was in part due to the rural location of the farm and my parents' desire to have more control of my education. The “school” was set up in the nursery and had traditional elements of a classroom, with desks, chairs, maps, and a blackboard. There was an American flag on a pole, and Bible verses on the walls. However, this “school” was largely a pretense. My brother and I did lessons which were sent to the institution in Illinois in order to validate the time spent in the classroom. Otherwise, there was a lot of “non-school” time. It was work time, and lots of play-time, as well.

Both of my parents attended college and both had experience teaching. I feel that they were qualified to educate me and they allowed for a non-traditional learning experience that was grounded in progressive philosophy. Without ever articulating their philosophy, the types of activities that became vehicles for my learning were designed so that I would construct knowledge. It was not a simple case of pouring in information and pouring out facts. I was an active participant on a working farm. I read, wrote, and painted, and acted, and danced—all seen as creative expression. I observed, reflected, and tended to many different aspects of the farm and learned practical, hands-on skills. It was as Dewey said: “Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not a preparation for life but is life itself” (as quoted in Copleston, 1976, p. 373)⁠. I was living an educational life.

Then came the 5th grade. My mother decided we (my brother and I) should go to school so that we could participate in sports. It was a small school in a rural district, about 12 miles from my home. For the first time in my education, I was expected to sit at a desk for the majority of the day. I was expected to raise my hand to speak, and was not rewarded for constructing knowledge but instead chastised for always having an answer ready. I was expected to play with the girls, although I had been raised in a neighborhood of boys, and write my homework assignments a certain way. Dancing, painting, and writing were no longer part of my daily activities. In a sense, the creative part of me was not tended. Instead my school life became more about following the rules of group learning and learning how to socialize with other children my age. I began to learn that in school, authority and submission are strongly emphasized. I observed that school was full of passive routines and that learning was nothing more than waiting your turn, and good penmanship. It felt extremely restrictive.

Elizabeth Ferm believed that “poor behavior” was a result of suppression and lack of self-activity and self-determination. I certainly felt creatively suppressed and had very little motivation to line up nicely every day. I find Ferm's ideas so interesting; she sought to create an environment in which her students could be creative. At one of her schools, each classroom was turned into a workshop, a place to make things. How I wish my public school had been like that! In the 1920's, when Ferm was in her sixties, she and her husband Alexis took over the Modern School at Stelton. Their work as teachers led them to allow more and more freedom of expression, both believing that the more freedom in individual has, the better will he express the innate goodness of life (E. B. Ferm & A. C. Ferm, 1949, p. 193)⁠.

In high school, I was an exchange student. The country I chose to go to, Venezuela, did not issue transcripts for their school system to foreigners. Essentially, it was a “free” year, free of the constraints of a classroom. I attended school sporadically. Much of my learning was outside of school. My host family (a large family, much like I was used to in Maine) took much pleasure in sharing their language and culture with me and once again I was able to construct knowledge through observation and participation. It was the most educational year of my schooling.

After graduating high school I found a job with the Maine Migrant School as a teacher's aide. I worked with Mexican, Salvadorian, Mic Mac and Passamaquoddy pre-school children in rural Washington County. The school director honored all cultures present with an opening ceremony and closing picnic. Every day the older children met in groups to discuss the activities of the day with their teachers. The younger children had more structure to their day, but essentially were encouraged to play, discover, create, draw, count, and the like. It was a unique school, with a diverse staff. Diversity training became the first workshop of each session of the Migrant School. In these sessions, the staff learned about the customs of each person. There were some very clear differences in childrearing customs between cultures. Each cultural group was asked to honor the difference of the staff members and their methods of relating to children and to ask questions of each other and to share cultural information with each other. This was done in order to create dialog and a sense of community among very diverse people. I enjoyed the Migrant School experience and feel the work done there was essentially a borderland theory into practice—a place where cultures, races, and beliefs intersect in a space that is not inherently belonging to one group or another, but is seen as a shared space.

After college, where I studied interdisciplinary fine arts, tending to the need to create in order to understand, I worked in a private school outside of Washington DC that was racially and ethnically diverse. I taught art and Spanish to privileged children of all backgrounds. My students were Persian, Trinidadian, Venezuelan, Salvadorian, Egyptian, American, Canadian, and more. The school was a non-denominational, Christian school with a philosophy of doing good works. At this school, action was seen as service to others, necessary to understanding the human condition. Students were constantly asked to reflect on social problems and how they best might mend them. Service trips were organized by youth group leaders, funds were raised by students washing cars or selling cookies. The primary idea was action—action to reduce inequities, and to meet the needs of a broken society. Not only that, but students were asked to reflect on what skills or talents they might possess or develop in order to serve others. It was not a case of training students to proselytize, but rather encouraging the development of gifts to be used for a purpose.

These first two experiences as “teacher”--both at the Migrant School and at the Christian school, developed a mindset within me that real learning was experiential, multicultural, creative, based on community, collaborative, and active.

As I continued with my vocation, teaching at a third school, I began to develop a teaching philosophy that assumed technology integration. My third school was in Maine, and was in fact the same high school I graduated from. There were laptops in the middle school and two large labs in the high school. I was assigned to teach a photojournalism class and received the lab as my classroom. It became much like one of Elizabeth Ferm's workshops—it was a place were things were created, recorded, shared, edited, and created again.

This integration of technology was promoted at this school. The Maine Laptop Initiative was in full swing and principals saw the need to teach using computers. I was given full access to the labs, the school servers, and I received 10 digital cameras for my students to use while creating the school yearbook. The students shot pictures, made web portfolios, entered contests, interviewed photojournalists, and created an award-winning yearbook. They also raised funds for the publication themselves, by selling ads that they designed to community businesses. I knew that my students were experiencing something “real”--not something to be read in a book, but something to be experienced. This followed the ideas of Dewey, and I found it very encouraging. It was a wonderful class, and I began to start thinking about how students could use technology to learn Spanish.

My teaching philosophy, thus far, embraced creative, collaborative works with action, audience, and a multicultural word view. There is something else that needs to be articulated. I operate under the assumption that there is new pedagogical knowledge, called TPCK, or Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge.

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge .

The TPCK framework builds on Shulman's idea of Pedagogical Content Knowledge. TPCK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge) argues: Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK) attempts to capture some of the essential qualities of knowledge required by teachers for technology integration in their teaching, while addressing the complex, multifaceted and situated nature of teacher knowledge. At the heart of the TPCK framework, is the complex interplay of three primary forms of knowledge: Content (C), Pedagogy (P), and Technology (T) (“TPCK - Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge - TPCK”)⁠.

In my field, which is modern languages, I discovered the content knowledge (the linguistic code, the cultures behind language) and the pedagogy (strategies of instruction) intersect quite nicely with the technologies available, including web messaging, social networking, texting, live streaming, podcasting, weblogging, and message boards.

Using these technologies, students make meaning, shape identity, initiate and facilitate change on local and global levels, collaborate, and create in a variety of mediums. There are real communities existing in a virtual world using platforms like Skype, Wordpress, Flickr, and Facebook. These are just a few of dozens of popular networking sites that exist for creative and social reasons. This is not new; communities have existed between networks for as long as the post office has been in business.

Distance education first began in America as a way to "encourage studies at home for the purpose of educational opportunities for women of all classes” (Nasseh, 1997)⁠. The genesis of this idea came from a woman named Anna Tricknor, who in 1873 established the Society to Encourage Studies at Home. Her father, George Tricknor, had been a modern language teacher at Harvard, and had afforded Anna a very aesthetic education. Composed mainly of volunteers, the Society educated over 10,000 members over a 24-year period. The method of collaboration was mail correspondence. In The New England Quarterly, author Harriet F. Bergmann wrote:

"It was a groundbreaking scheme, designed to draw on the intellectual attainments of Ticknor's leisured and wealthy friends to further the education of women throught the country. The means were simple: an enlightened, modern curriculum; a lending library; and a warm correspondence between woman teacher and woman learner” (Bergmann, 2001, p. 447)⁠.

What differs today are the media through which information is shared and knowledge is constructed. And the exciting news is that the information can be shared and knowledge constructed using simple tools in the target language.

How does it work? There are several core components to technological networking in education. The first component is is that audience is essential, and exposes students to diversity of thought. Using such programs as Wordpress, Flickr, Facebook or Skype, students connect to a global audience, often one that gives immediate feedback. Student work has meaning and focus when it is done for the benefit and understanding of others. "When students write for a distinct audience of their peers, they are more fluent, they are better organized, and their ideas are more clearly stated and supported” (Andres & Rogers, 2006, p. 2)⁠. Through the interaction between student and audience, diversity can be recognized and shared. "In the Freirean method, the purpose of the dialog is to help both the teacher and student understand the political, economic, and social forces that have shaped their lives” (Spring, 1994, p. 159).⁠

The second core component is to value creative acts and to allow students to express their own individuality using technological tools. "Students learn best when their learning and activities relate to things which they can identify with personally” (Andres & Rogers,, 2006, p. 4)⁠. When "learning" in my classroom, my students' experience is what is most important, as well as their creative world and how they express themselves. They are more free to pursue what is interesting to them and they are given the tools to acquire the knowledge they need. It is through creation that students learn. Technology allows students to be infinitely creative, and then widely broadcast their work, which enhances its quality.

The third component about teaching with technology relates directly to Loris Malaguzzi's methodologies, which are used in Reggio Emilio schools: document, document, document. Today's technology allows for documentation on a large scale. Seong Bock Hong summarizes the purpose of documentation as the process by which teachers gather information about children’s ideas and their thinking process. In my case, it involves recording students speaking, taking pictures of them working, and videotaping their activities. Documentation is done daily so teachers can discuss their curriculum, keep it fluid and emergent and develop rational for its course. This is essential: pay attention every day. I have found that students are appreciate the feedback and have a say in where their learning is going. Documentation is also data for study. It allows me to chart growth over time. Scripts that I have saved from instant messages between students and myself show to what extent the students are using the second language. Documentations facilitates continuity across a given activity, because new activities evolve from earlier experiences. This is the revision and editing process of a creative act. Things evolve and change. It also offers a research orientation to instruction. The teacher is constantly observing and learning about her students. It allows teachers to revisit with children. This creates dialog. It is concrete, active and reflective, provides the right amount of support to enable children to perform a task, and is at the heart of each project or experience. Documentation serves as a lesson planner and it defines the teacher as a facilitator (Hong, 1998, pp. 50-51).⁠

The idea of creating networks is central to my vocation as a teacher. Technology allows me to create community, again and again, using platforms that are continually evolving through collective practice and knowledge. Martin Buber believed that at the heart of communities are special people - the builders. They are at the center of a web. They live the dialogical life. Builders both express and symbolize relation, and animate community. As a teacher/builder, my role is to encourage good works. "Freire's teachers engage in an educational process designed to raise levels of consciousness, change personalities, and transform the world” (Spring, 1994, p. 159).⁠

One of the ways in which change can be instituted in education is to allow for change to occur by promoting student action. This means that students must be seen as capable of instituting change. It also requires that students be seen as capable of identifying, analyzing and constructing solutions to problems within their community. Loris Malaguzzi encourages this in his Reggio Emilio schools.

To answer the question: for what purpose are students in school? My personal answer is to build communities that can institute change. Each class, each group of students in my care, is seen as unique and able to contribute to a collective consciousness. This requires dialog. Technology allows for increased dialog through such platforms as Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, and countless others. Once students are connected to a network, their voice can be heard and responses encouraged to build community and stimulate action.

In my classroom, everyone assumes the role of facilitator. Each student owns knowledge and is a contributor. Each student has something to share. Web platforms such as Flickr, Facebook, and Wordpress encourage audience participation. These new methods to connect with each other are powerful tools. I do not take them lightly.

While students are given much creative choice in their classroom experience, there are some rules or boundaries to establish when integrating technology. One rule in my classroom is that the parents ultimately decide whether or not they will allow their children to build networks. The Internet is a very, very open place. I respect the parents' choice to restrict access to the Internet. There are also rule of etiquette that must be explained to new users. In the case of students, aliases are used instead of real names. Personal information such as address and phone number are not allowed to be shared. Students may breach this code of conduct, but it must be established nonetheless in order to protect the privacy of individuals within the network.

Should language learning, then, be confined to the computer screen and the projector? Absolutely not. There should be action of a political sort—initiating change, reducing inequity—but also of an experiential sort. My students should build community using technology, but they are also charged with going out into their physical world and taking action. Ultimately, the experience that is most educational will not be the interview with a girl in Chile via Skype, but instead the act of going to that new place and meeting that girl in person. Total immersion is the best way to learn a language. Technology is what is used in its stead to create an immersed environment.

Physical activity is also important in my teaching philosophy. This stems from my study of Martha Graham, the great modern dancer. Movement never lies, in her estimation. To that end, I try to get my students moving every day. Kinesthetic intelligence can now be documented using the Wii technology--a most fascinating gaming system using Second Life technology. I encourage movement in the classroom and would like to develop further theories about movement and language learning. Currently, TPR (Total Physical Response) is used in modern language classrooms, but it is largely teacher-driven, and not student created.

The major issue in my field of study is something known as the digital divide. The digital divide is the gap between access to technology. It is commonly referred to when comparing first and third world countries, even though it can apply to communities in the United States. States such as Maine, featuring rural populations with low socioeconomic status, have initiated laptop projects in the schools in an effort to transform communities. This effort was lead by Seymour Papert. Similarly, the One Laptop per Child initiative began at MIT and became a separate foundation with projects in Brazil, Nigeria, Thailand, Peru, Uruguay, and India. The premise is to leverage children by engaging them more directly in their own learning. The project provides teachers and students with new ways to collaborate, create, and transform works over time.

In conclusion, my teaching philosophy has been developed through a series of multicultural and technological experiences. Collaboration and creation, action and movement, audience and experience all play a role in language learning in my classroom. Technology is integrated to maximize the networks required to make social change. In sum, it is technology that allows my students to make meaning of and connections in their world.

SOURCES CITED

Andres, Y. M., & Rogers,, A. (2006). Project Based Learning. . Retrieved from []. Bergmann, H. F. (2001). "The Silent University": The Society to Encourage Studies at Home, 1873-1897. The New England Quarterly, 74(3), 447-477. Copleston, F. C. (1976). History of Philosophy: Bentham to Russell (p. 592). Paulist Press. Ferm, E. B., & Ferm, A. C. (1949). Freedom in education. New York: Lear. Hong, S. (1998). Documentation panel-making and revisiting using technology to enhance observation and instruction skills in student teachers. Nasseh, B. (1997). History of Distance Education. . Retrieved from []. Spring, J. H. (1994). Wheels in the head : educational philosophies of authority, freedom, and culture from Socrates to Paulo Freire. New York: McGraw-Hill. TPCK - Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge - TPCK. . Retrieved July 29, 2008, from []. .