Nuestra Tierra: a University/Public School Technology Integration Project

Karin M. Wiburg, Ed.D. New Mexico State University

Nidelia Montoya Ysleta Independent School District, Texas

John Sandin New Mexico State University

Purpose

This paper describes the results of a two-year university/public school collaborative project designed to investigate technology integration in southwest border schools. The design and implementation of the research was guided by a three-part question: What would happen if:

teachers were fully supported in integrating technology in the classroom;
the curriculum was culturally relevant and meaningful to the students;
and the computer was used as a constructivist tool rather than an electronic workbook?

The research took place in six schools, two elementary, two middle, one high school and a Newcomer Center for high school-age monolingual Spanish speakers in a United States/Mexican border community of around 70,000 people. Over sixty percent of the student population in the district is Latino/a. The average income per capita is one of the lowest in the country, around $14,000 /year. Achievement scores on standardized tests for students in the district are generally in the fiftieth percentile or lower. The project, Nuestra Tierra (our land), took place between August 1995 and September 1997 and was supported by a $300,000 grant from the USWEST Foundation.

Theoretical Framework

As the demographics of the United States change, research on technology integration in culturally diverse schools becomes increasingly relevant. By the year 2020, one-half of the nation's school children will be non-European American (Au, 1993), and one quarter will be Hispanic (Darder, Ingle, and Cox, 1993).

The students in our classrooms reflect this changed world, yet the curriculum is based on materials and instructional strategies developed in the first half of the Twentieth century when nearly three-fourths of all students were European Americans (Pallas, Natriello, & McDill, 1989) and the country's human resource needs were the product of an industrial, rather than an information age. This curriculum is inappropriate in both content and activities for today's and tomorrow's student populations and is often in direct conflict with many students' cultures and community lives (Darder, Ingle, & Cox, 1993). Research shows that powerful new technologies exist which can assist in developing better learning environments for all students (Knapp & Glenn, 1996; Boldt, Gustafson, Johnson, 1995), yet these technologies are not used by public school teachers because they exist as isolated products, are often inaccessible to teachers, and are not well-integrated with the school curriculum. Those strategies that are currently used with low achieving students, the traditional drill and practice approach, do not tap the potential of technology to assist higher-level learning and lack evidence that they are useful approaches for language minority and low-achieving populations (Hativa, 1988; Hunt and Pritchard, 1993 ). Currently, if educational technology is available at all to poor and minority schools, it is used in a way which is disconnected from classroom instruction (Tucker, 1992), or mainly for white, male and/or high-ability students (Skelle, 1993).

In contrast to the use of the computer as a teaching machine, this research was based on the implementation of constructivist uses of computers. Constructivism is a theory of how knowledge is constructed ( Fosnot, 1989). In order for students to learn deeply, they must move beyond the memorization of isolated facts and engage in experiences of hypothesizing and predicting, manipulating data and objects, researching answers, synthesizing their findings, imagining, investigating, and inventing. Brooks and Brooks (1993) suggest that educators who design learning experiences for students using constructivist notions of learning follow five principles: (1) posing problems of emerging relevance to students; (2) structuring learning around primary concepts such as conceptual clusters or problems; (3) seeking and valuing students' points of view; (4) adapting curriculum to address students' suppositions; and (5) assessing student learning in the context of teaching. To these five principles, Norton and Wiburg (1998) have added a sixth principle which addresses the need to select technology tools which afford opportunities for students to construct knowledge. Software for this project was chosen on the basis of the following questions derived from work by Wiburg, 1995; Bull and Cochran, 1991 and Polin, 1992. Does the computer-mediated learning environment :

provide for student control and choices of activities?
support opportunities for groups of students to work and collaborate with the material?
encourage prediction and successive approximations to solving problems?
focus on learning and problem-solving rather than on product?
facilitate a three-way interaction between student, teacher, and computer?
provide opportunities for students to investigate and interact with rich problems?
present a variety of different perspectives for the concepts being taught?
and provide opportunities for students to create their own links between different kinds of information both off and on the computer?

In addition to the need for culturally-relevant and constructivist learning activities, efforts to integrate technology with teaching were also based on the research on change. Fullen (1996) suggests that true change must be both top-down and bottom-up and takes place when all participants come to view themselves as capable of locating the resources to significantly improve students' learning experiences. School teams representing all stakeholders must engage in ongoing formative evaluation and be encouraged to implement successful strategies immediately. The project was designed to support these organizational change strategies as well as expected pedagogical change as teachers integrated technology with their teaching ( Dwyer, Rinstaff, and Sandholtz, 1990).

Methodology

The funding agency, as well as our understanding of the research problem, required a qualitative approach. Drawing from research on constructivist uses of rich technology environments (Dwyer, Rinstaff, and Sandholtz, 1990; Tierney, 1992), we expected a variety of factors to interact in complex and even unpredictable ways when teachers and students are engaged in redesigning learning using technology. Factors influencing the project design included providing teachers with a rich technology environment, sustained technical and instructional support, long-term guidance on the constructivist use of computers, an orientation toward action research and a focus on culturally-relevant and community-based content. In order to focus our research, the grant proposal was designed around questions aligned with project goals.

Goals and Research Questions
Goals	Research Questions
1. Collaborative Curriculum Development	Is there collaboration between university researchers, graduate students, teachers, administrators, students and the community? Does collaborative curriculum development result in learning activities which are more relevant to students?
2. Multimedia and Learning	Have technology-based curricula been developed that integrates content areas? Are students' personal experiences, including cultural backgrounds, used in learning products? Are alternative assessments being used to demonstrate knowledge? Are opportunities provided for students to ask questions and discover answers?
3. Effective Professional Development	Do teachers have a more positive attitude about using technology and teaching about their local community? Have training and support been sufficient to encourage use of technology in the classroom? Has sufficient time been given to develop curriculum for the Nuestra Tierra Project? Are teachers using expanded instructional strategies (questioning, cooperative learning, use of a variety of media) as a result of this project?
4. Dissemination/ Sustainability	Are materials and strategies widely disseminated and used within the partner sites? Are materials and strategies adopted by new partner schools in the second year? Are online resources developed during this project available on the web and useful to the educational community?

Both traditional descriptive research methods as well as phenomenological approaches were employed to evaluate the entire project. Our close collaboration with teachers provided them and us with additional opportunities to engage in small action research projects focused on specific aspects of the study. Action research encourages teachers and others to begin to identify problems in the classroom and school setting and then to design and evaluate their own solutions to these problems (Burnaford, Fischer, & Hobson, 1996). Action research projects within this study included the impact of using computers and electronic communication on students' perceptions of learning social studies (Sandin, 1997) and the implementation and assessment of a project approach for integrating one to four computers in the classroom (Sharp & Parra, 1997).

Data Sources

Observations, field notes, in-depth interviews and Likert-type surveys were used to gain information about the project from teachers, students, administrators, and the university support team. The surveys, which were aligned with the research questions, were given at the end of both the first and second project year. Field notes from both university researchers and teachers were compiled into quarterly reports by the principle investigator and sent to the funding agency whose evaluators provided additional information and guidance. Student and teacher projects were also collected and published via multimedia presentations and/or the construction of web pages (http://www.cahe.nmsu.edu/uswest/).

Rich information was gained through qualitative methods. Two graduate assistants, Sandin and Saxton, as well as the principle investigator (PI), Wiburg, chose to work closely with teachers on a continuous basis in each of the three first-year schools. They acted as participant observers and were involved in team teaching with the project teachers. Each spent from four to eight hours per week in their adopted school. They took field notes on student and teacher behaviors, as well as classroom and school environments and interactions. Saxton also conducted phenomenological in-depth interviews to investigate what meaning the project had for teachers. As participant observers, Saxton, Sandin and Wiburg, assisted teachers with the integration of technology utilizing a constructivist and community-based approach to learning. The research team members met weekly with their school teams in order to build thematic, culturally-relevant and cross-disciplinary approaches to teaching, while observing and taking field notes on how the teaching/learning environment was being affected by this intervention (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994). Wiburg and the two graduate research assistants also met once each month with each other in order to compare information and adjust their work as necessary.

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