Diversity
When I consider education in the 21st Century, it is important to recognize that we, as educators, are involved with a very different diversity landscape than perhaps has ever been experienced before. Access to, and the use of technology has become so integrated across the lives of our students. It is not just inside the four walls of the brick and mortar school but across their whole being and which will affect their futures as lifelong learners. As digital natives born, they need to be able to thrive and survive a whole world of diversity at their fingertips!
While diversity, in general, broadly considers ethnicity, gender, socio-economic, learning abilities, I would argue that diversity becomes even more expansive given the access that technology has provided to our students through information communication tools. A child sitting in a classroom in Atlanta, GA can just as easily converse with a student via Face Time or Skype in another city, state, country or continent. The ability to hear, see, collaborate, communicate, create and resonate with humans that are culturally, climatically, politically, geographically and physically different from themselves gives students in the 21st Century a wider scope to endeavor to understand the intrinsic workings of our globalized planet and our united human existence. Instructional technology needs to consider this in educating the student in an authentic, holistic sense.
This demands the educator in technology integration to have a wide array of dispositions, tools and experiences to insure that diversity is addressed in a positive and successful way in today’s schools.
Therefore, as I have completed this course, I have developed through a variety of practices that attest to my professional ability that relate to addressing diversity in the modern school environment for all community stakeholders. Focus has been on working on a curriculum that honors the stakeholders with whom I work (students, teachers, parents, the local and international community) in terms of their life experiences.
1. Designing a curriculum through unit planning that considers Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT)
CRT is, according to (Gay, 2002), “based on the assumption that when academic knowledge and skills are situated within the lived experiences and frames of reference of students, they are more personally meaningful, have higher interest appeal and are learned more easily and thoroughly” (p. 106). Therefore, as part of my Capstone Project, I worked with a small number of teachers identified from their attendance during “Lunch and Learn” voluntary professional development and helped them to address their technology integration depth using the LoTi model of technology integration based around the International Baccalaureate (IB) Middle Years Programme (MYP) Unit of Inquiry Planner for teaching and learning. In this, the teachers with whom I worked had the opportunity to reflect on their teaching using technology and strongly look to their differentiation based on an analysis of their core teaching and use of technology to “focus on the quantity, accuracy, complexity, placement, purpose, variety, significance and authenticity of the narrative texts, visual illustrations, learning activities, role models and authorial sources used in instructional materials” (Gay, 2002)(p.108). By authentically assessing the use of technology and resources across a curriculum that is taught to an already culturally diverse population in an international setting and being mindful of the differentiation and access to culturally rich materials, educators can instruct their core subject discipline in a way that not only reaches a richer and deeper level of technology integration, but enhances the students’ understanding of the cultures sitting within the four walls and across the international educational spectrum.
2. Lunch and Learn Professional Development
Having used the ideas behind Design Thinking, I empathized with our teachers and designed short, thirty-minute snapshots of professional development that could be further enhanced by working with me as the instructional technologist in their curricular design or in their classrooms in integrating technology. This really opened up a diversity conversation as the native language speaking teachers (Chinese, Spanish, ESL) tended to attend these the most in order to best manifest technology integration for their students. In addition, one of these sessions focused on Assistive Technology and conversations around student access and use of these kinds of devices to augment their learning experience.
3. Working with students for whom English is not their first language
Being in an international school often presents challenges. Part of my acumen developed over the time in this programme was to work with a student for whom English was not his first or his second language and use differentiated teaching and learning in my subject discipline classroom and technology integration through software and assistive devices to enable him to access the core concepts, understandings and knowledge to complete the course successfully.
4. Providing learning experiences through creating classroom websites for learning.
As students in my current school already have a 1:1 laptop programme, my focus was to provide access to using Google Sites not only for teaching and learning, but also for the student to curate their own resources and ideas and document their work without using a hard copy notebook. While some accommodation had to be made for more tactile learners (drawing out ideas, scanning and uploading), the students found this open method for documenting their learning experience in my classroom a way to overcome some learning issues (access to enlarging the size of text, choices for lexile reading levels for non-fiction, for example) to understand the subject better.
5. Working with parents to address use of laptops during parent workshops.
This year, as the Instructional Technologist for grades 6 – 12, I had the opportunity to work with a wide diversity of parents in onboarding their fifth grade students to owning a laptop and the implications of access to this kind of device in multiple languages, (for example, setting up software for dropdown menus in the student’s mother tongue of Spanish, French, German or Chinese). This afforded a wealth of experience to align acumen to build trust with parents in deployment and use of technology with their children in the school setting.
This is by no means a definitive list of opportunities to co-opt diversity into my work as both a classroom teacher infusing technology and as an instructional technologist. My testimony in the many diverse field experiences on the tab at the top of my electronic portfolio will further elaborate on other areas of diversity for consideration.
References Gay, G. (2002). Preparing for culturally responsive teaching
Journal of Teacher Education / American Association of Colleges for
Teacher Education , 53 (2), 106-116.
While diversity, in general, broadly considers ethnicity, gender, socio-economic, learning abilities, I would argue that diversity becomes even more expansive given the access that technology has provided to our students through information communication tools. A child sitting in a classroom in Atlanta, GA can just as easily converse with a student via Face Time or Skype in another city, state, country or continent. The ability to hear, see, collaborate, communicate, create and resonate with humans that are culturally, climatically, politically, geographically and physically different from themselves gives students in the 21st Century a wider scope to endeavor to understand the intrinsic workings of our globalized planet and our united human existence. Instructional technology needs to consider this in educating the student in an authentic, holistic sense.
This demands the educator in technology integration to have a wide array of dispositions, tools and experiences to insure that diversity is addressed in a positive and successful way in today’s schools.
Therefore, as I have completed this course, I have developed through a variety of practices that attest to my professional ability that relate to addressing diversity in the modern school environment for all community stakeholders. Focus has been on working on a curriculum that honors the stakeholders with whom I work (students, teachers, parents, the local and international community) in terms of their life experiences.
1. Designing a curriculum through unit planning that considers Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT)
CRT is, according to (Gay, 2002), “based on the assumption that when academic knowledge and skills are situated within the lived experiences and frames of reference of students, they are more personally meaningful, have higher interest appeal and are learned more easily and thoroughly” (p. 106). Therefore, as part of my Capstone Project, I worked with a small number of teachers identified from their attendance during “Lunch and Learn” voluntary professional development and helped them to address their technology integration depth using the LoTi model of technology integration based around the International Baccalaureate (IB) Middle Years Programme (MYP) Unit of Inquiry Planner for teaching and learning. In this, the teachers with whom I worked had the opportunity to reflect on their teaching using technology and strongly look to their differentiation based on an analysis of their core teaching and use of technology to “focus on the quantity, accuracy, complexity, placement, purpose, variety, significance and authenticity of the narrative texts, visual illustrations, learning activities, role models and authorial sources used in instructional materials” (Gay, 2002)(p.108). By authentically assessing the use of technology and resources across a curriculum that is taught to an already culturally diverse population in an international setting and being mindful of the differentiation and access to culturally rich materials, educators can instruct their core subject discipline in a way that not only reaches a richer and deeper level of technology integration, but enhances the students’ understanding of the cultures sitting within the four walls and across the international educational spectrum.
2. Lunch and Learn Professional Development
Having used the ideas behind Design Thinking, I empathized with our teachers and designed short, thirty-minute snapshots of professional development that could be further enhanced by working with me as the instructional technologist in their curricular design or in their classrooms in integrating technology. This really opened up a diversity conversation as the native language speaking teachers (Chinese, Spanish, ESL) tended to attend these the most in order to best manifest technology integration for their students. In addition, one of these sessions focused on Assistive Technology and conversations around student access and use of these kinds of devices to augment their learning experience.
3. Working with students for whom English is not their first language
Being in an international school often presents challenges. Part of my acumen developed over the time in this programme was to work with a student for whom English was not his first or his second language and use differentiated teaching and learning in my subject discipline classroom and technology integration through software and assistive devices to enable him to access the core concepts, understandings and knowledge to complete the course successfully.
4. Providing learning experiences through creating classroom websites for learning.
As students in my current school already have a 1:1 laptop programme, my focus was to provide access to using Google Sites not only for teaching and learning, but also for the student to curate their own resources and ideas and document their work without using a hard copy notebook. While some accommodation had to be made for more tactile learners (drawing out ideas, scanning and uploading), the students found this open method for documenting their learning experience in my classroom a way to overcome some learning issues (access to enlarging the size of text, choices for lexile reading levels for non-fiction, for example) to understand the subject better.
5. Working with parents to address use of laptops during parent workshops.
This year, as the Instructional Technologist for grades 6 – 12, I had the opportunity to work with a wide diversity of parents in onboarding their fifth grade students to owning a laptop and the implications of access to this kind of device in multiple languages, (for example, setting up software for dropdown menus in the student’s mother tongue of Spanish, French, German or Chinese). This afforded a wealth of experience to align acumen to build trust with parents in deployment and use of technology with their children in the school setting.
This is by no means a definitive list of opportunities to co-opt diversity into my work as both a classroom teacher infusing technology and as an instructional technologist. My testimony in the many diverse field experiences on the tab at the top of my electronic portfolio will further elaborate on other areas of diversity for consideration.
References Gay, G. (2002). Preparing for culturally responsive teaching
Journal of Teacher Education / American Association of Colleges for
Teacher Education , 53 (2), 106-116.