Desiree Pointer Mace
Thursday, February 21, 2008
I am a teacher. I used to teach children; now I teach college students. But when you say you’re a teacher, people may completely misapprehend your passions, your motives, your daily routines, your workload, your relationships with your students... it goes on. As many have said, teaching evaporates. It’s hard to share outside of the moment. Our mutual work addresses that problem in powerful ways.
Our convening at Carnegie is a homecoming for me-- as several of you know I got my start working with multimedia representations of teaching and learning at the Carnegie Foundation, in 1998. At the time, I was finishing my doctoral work at UC Berkeley and coordinating the technology strand of the elementary teacher credential program there. When I arrived at Carnegie, Lee had just given Tom Hatch the mission (should he choose to accept it) of helping invent the Knowledge Media Lab. Library, laboratory and museum, was the charge, and I was given the task of helping to imagine how the work generated by the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) fellows might build on emerging multimedia technologies.
Over the next several years, our efforts in this area grew exponentially. We worked with fellows in the CASTL Projects (Higher Ed. and K-12/Teacher Ed), the Goldman-Carnegie Quest Project for Signature Pedagogies in Teacher Education, and the Noyce Carnegie Professional Development in Literacy Project.
We gave a great deal of thought to what goes into a multimedia representation of teaching. In my years spent teaching elementary school in Oakland and San Francisco, I’d learned well that teaching is inherently multilayered and multivocal. Our multimedia representations of teaching and learning strived to honor that layeredness and complexity. Many of the websites include a diverse array of artifacts: Video clips of teaching, learning, and reflecting on teaching and learning; examples of student work; class materials; narratives about teachers’ professional journeys and context; and an attempt to look back and look forward from any given teaching moment. This is not something we claim to have done expertly, but we have been able to follow these examples as they have been used for teacher learning in preservice and professiona
l development contexts.
For many years, the MRTs were like classrooms-- separate, pertaining to a single practitioner. When we collaborated with the Noyce Foundation and their Every Child a Reader and Writer Program, we were able to shift this focus to an emphasis on practices, looking across multiple classrooms to see how similar practices were enacted in different contexts, as well as how each of these teachers’ practice connected to a professional development series in the teaching of personal narrative writing.
All of these MRTs are assembled at InsideTeaching.org, a “living archive” that we hope will continue to grow with additional examples from allied initiatives. InsideTeaching allows audiences to search for MRTs by
subject area, grade level, and practitioner name. It is a small collection, but my hope is that some archive of MRTs could appropriate some of the folksonomic tagging protocols of Flickr and Deli.cio.us so that a co-created network of connections between the cases could emerge.
As a new generation of students grows up with their entire lives chronicled on Facebook and Twitter, I wonder about how our MRTs can keep up with that constant-update mentality. I worry about how much time it takes to develop literacies around the use of these MRTs so that others in teacher education can integrate them effectively. But mostly, I’m inspired by the potential of these examples to move teaching practice from margin to center (to borrow a phrase from bell hooks) in conversations about education: research, reform, and reconceiving practice.
After many years of “talking the talk” in leading efforts to integrate these MRTs into environments of teacher learning, I now have the opportunity to use them myself in my own teacher education classes. I have posted my syllabi here on my faculty website; interested folks can see how I draw upon various sites for different purposes in a foundations course, a subject area (social studies) and a senior research seminar.
I’m looking forward to our conversations next month!
