Learning and Technology: Implications for Culturally Responsive Instructional Activity and Models of Achievement

Abstract

New forms of learning achievement are being made possible by the introduction of computers and multimedia into classroom activities. With proper planning, it is possible to improve the cultural responsiveness of instruction while addressing students' attainment of critical subject matter and curriculum standards. This article describes several instructional activities that allow students to express their own cultural heritage through the development of World Wide Web pages and video dramatizations of important historical events and personages. These activities raise the possibility of innovative performance assessments that are suited to new forms of achievement. INTRODUCTION We in the United States are in the midst of a fundamental transformation of classroom learning and schooling that is being made possible by the widespread availability of computers and other electronic technologies in the schools and elsewhere. The promised revolution in schooling through use of computers did not materialize as expected 20 years ago, yet now the rapid diffusion of powerful microcomputers and other multimedia devices in schools has begun to affect large numbers of students (Viadero, 1997). This diffusion has dramatic implications for efforts to improve the schooling outcomes of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. However, we educators have only just begun to understand how this diffusion can be harnessed in the service of improving outcomes for these students. One of the reasons for this lack of vision is that the new forms of learning being made possible through technology are creating altogether new forms of student achievement that defy the simple application of popular notions of achievement. Achievement as shown through evidence of memory for facts and concepts tied to subject-matter learning and focused solving of specific problem tasks in a subject area remain important forms of school achievement. Whereas those notions of achievement are not outmoded, there have evolved new forms of learning, facilitated through technology, that suggest expanded definitions of what might count as learning. This article explores some of the latter possibilities by describing the computer and other electronic media learning experiences of culturally and linguistically diverse elementary school students. As it demonstrates, the emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW) and other forms of electronic media in the everyday life of schools is having a transformative effect on the education of children. Though many think of the electronic revolution in school learning as based primarily on computers, other multimedia electronic technologies are beginning to have a dramatic effects on classroom learning and strategies that can be used to realize the learning standards adopted by state and local education agencies. These and other new technologies have fundamental importance for multiculturalism in educational practice. ISLA VISTA'S WEB WORKERS Isla Vista Elementary School is located just north of Santa Barbara, California, in the urban nonincorporated community of Goleta, home to more than 75,000 residents. The school serves over 700 children representing more than 15 language backgrounds. More than 60% of its students are Latino; however, there is a growing awareness among the children, teachers, and families of Isla Vista of their membership in the global community. Evidence of this is found on the school's WWW home pages where, beneath a graphic showing children's hands linked around planet Earth, the moniker of the Isla Vista School reads: Home to the Children of Isla Vista and the World. There is a similar awareness on their part of the centrality of their own racial/ethnic group identity and of the linkage of this identity to everyday presentations of the self as a member of a diverse community. Freddy' exemplifies this awareness. He is a sixth-grade African American student at Isla Vista in a Spanish-English bilingual classroom taught by Mr. …