In Chapter 18, the idea that businesses or schools would hire a design consultant really spoke to me because my husband works for a company that is often hired by area school districts to help them decide how and when to implement technology into their various buildings. My husband's role is to meet with district technology leaders and offer them different solutions for different rooms in terms of audio visual equipment. In this way, he is a consultant for them. So, right away I see how this idea of the role instructional designers as mentioned in the book is incorporated into the school setting. I'm sure most school districts "hire out" other instructional designers in their various fields of expertise.
The other topic that interested me from this chapter was the idea of localizing information after it has already been internationalized. Unfortunately for schools, it seems to me that we use textbooks that have been internationalized and don't specifically speak to students of one background or another. My teaching experience has mostly been in a district that is pretty diverse. In fact, one elementary school that I teach at is a dual-language school and 50% of instruction is done in Spanish and the other 50% is done in English. This is to help support our Latino population as well as offer language learning opportunities for native English speakers. However, in my undergrad coursework, I was able to glean the idea that most textbooks, curriculum and tests are written for white, middle-class students. I think most students would benefit from learning from materials that were more specific to their backgrounds. For example, I once saw a student struggling with a math problem-solving question that asked about going to different summer camps. The concept was to add multiple numbers with there being one number in the problem that was irrelevant. The student knew how to add multiple numbers but seemed to be baffled by the idea of summer camp. I mean, not all students have the opportunity to go to summer camp, so why are we asking questions about it? If the test had asked him to add up points to a sports game or something more neutral, maybe the student would've done better altogether. This idea of localizing instruction is one that I hope schools and educators at the state level look into. I would guess the main concern would be, as always, money.
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I see what you are saying about curriculum that has been internationalized, i.e. generic, but that the problem is that it overlooks the diversity you speak of. However, if they are going to localize a textbook for your situations, aren't they going to have to do it in more than one way in order to reach different groups?
ReplyDeleteI understand where you are coming from with your summer camp example. It would be great if we could write 100 different textbooks that relate to every student specifically, but that really isn't logical or feasable. From what I have experiece in my classes, it really isn't the content of the story that confuses the kids, it is the fact that it is a story problem in general. If we could localize subjects, that would be so nice, my job would be easier.
ReplyDeleteI can relate to how you feel about teaching in such a diverse school. I work in an International school with many different cultures. Many of our students are attending school in Japan because their parents are expatiates. Although we teach in English, sometimes the culture interferes with their learning. Just understanding basic things can be difficult for them.
ReplyDeleteWe need more people like your husband to implement new technology for our schools. I feel we dont' get a lot of support from technological side. Most of the time, we are thrown into the deep-end assuming that we already know how to use them.