Re: connecting and co-construction part 4

From: Bill Barowy (wbarowy@mail.lesley.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 18 1999 - 15:26:27 PST


On the sustainable changes to the activity system, addressing developmental
validity:
Among some of the challenges are addressing not only the differences in the
teaching practices within the schools, but also the routines within and
among the institutions, and any transformations in the distribution of
labor and capital, i.e., new work ecologies, that will sustain those
attempted changes in practices.

Briefly here are some changes in practices:
district A-- now studies ecologies of ponds with a focus on
macroinvertebrates, the children study their, and their partner school's,
community and pond, they make field trip visits to the partner school and
pond, and they write letters to their pen-pals with the children in the
partner school. The teachers have adopted new learning materials, i.e.
books about ponds, adapted other lessons to address ponds (such as using
venn diagrams from the chicago math materials to draw a comparison of the
two ponds' ecologies), a consultant from the audubon visits and conducts
some learning activities about pond ecology, new networked computers have
appeared in the classrooms, the second grade made a platform change from
mac to pc (footnote 1), the curriculum coordinator has correlated what
children have been learning to the Massachusetts state curriculum
frameworks.

One question is, as this activity unfolds, what other changes can unfold to
support the aforementioned changes in practice, to closer approach
sustainability, and addressing more fully developmental validity? Changes
in school budget allocation for example could allow the Audubon consultant
to make his visits and be reimbursed directly from school funds, or pay for
the field trips to the other schools directly. Partially, the
redistribution of project funds to the schools provided the schools the
ability to acquire artifacts/capital -- books and computers that have a
lifetime of many years. The availability of the computer in the classroom
does not ensure, but makes more probable, the development of the teachers'
technological skills. This overlay of changes-for-sustainability includes
teacher technology training in the context of the work that they are doing
(their teaching practices and curriculum coordination) and is be the basis
for the 'professional development in the context of innovation' facet that
will be presented in a roundtable at aera.

Oops.. mind-brain cramp... more later...

(footnote 1) this was a consequence of the redistribution of the project
budget, turning over approx $10k to each school district, for the district
to have local control over the decisions of how they wanted to allocate
resources to support the project activities. District A bought computers
and the lower cost of the pc platform allowed the better distribution of
technology across the participants. The availability of the computers
induced a change in the technology plan and those classrooms were networked
earlier than anticipated.

Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Lesley College, 31 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
 and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]



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