I thought some xmca-ers might find this interesting:
>Dr. Margaret Honey, Director
>Center for Children and Technology
>
> > For the past eight years, the Center for Children and Technology has
> been working in collaboration with the Union City New Jersey Schools to
> integrate technologies into their district wide reform efforts. In 1995,
> in collaboration with the Union City Board of Education and Bell
> Atlantic, CCT was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to
> conduct a project called Union City Online: An Architecture for
> Networking and Reform. This effort built upon earlier work, and extended
> the networking infrastructure to the District's remaining ten schools.
> The project also launched a number of other projects to develop the human
> infrastructure - the people resources that it takes to make a complex
> project like this succeed and remain successful overtime. Another core
> goal of Union City Online was to take a substantial and sustained look at
> the relationship between networked technology and education reform.
> > What is critical in this story is what has happened in Union City
> during the past 10 years. In 1989, the Union City schools were failing in
> 44 out of the 52 categories that the State of New Jersey uses to
> determine the effectiveness of their school districts. They were failing
> in areas such as student attendance, drop-out rates, and scores on
> standardized tests, and as a result they were facing state takeover. Like
> many urban districts, Union City was also facing many obstacles to
> correcting these deficiencies, including language barriers, parents with
> limited formal education, and students with little incentive to stay in school.
> > Rather than lose local control of the school district, however, Union
> City decided to face these challenges head on and drastically reform the
> entire educational system. The District formulated and implemented a
> five-year Corrective Action Plan calling for systemic changes in the
> educational system. Using their own version of a whole-language approach
> to learning -- which put literacy front and center in their reform
> efforts -- the District focused on creating a curriculum which would
> support students in moving away from rote learning and toward the
> development of thinking, reasoning and collaboration skills. Union City
> is currently the only special needs district in the state of New Jersey
> that has students performing at levels that are comparable to suburban
> schools in the state.
> > Our seven years of collaboration with Union City has taught us a great
> deal. As researchers we have focused on rethinking our assumptions; our
> methodologies, and our orientation toward the process of technological
> design and innovation.
> > Key assumptions in doing this kind of research include:
> > … Recognizing that technologies in and of themselves rarely bring about
> substantial change in teaching and learning.
> > … Understanding that the impact of technology on specific aspects of
> teaching and learning can be usefully understood only in context.
> > Methodological features of this kind of research include the following:
> > … It is largely process-oriented. The researchers' goal is to
> understand how innovation occurs in schools, not just what the outcomes
> correlated with the innovation are.
> > … It is oriented toward change rather than doing better within the old
> framework. Tools and programs that are interesting to study are those
> that support or act as catalysts for change in the organization of
> teaching and learning.
> > … Teachers and researchers play an active role in interpreting
> technologies as tools for reforming schools and in supporting and
> sometimes guiding the change process.
> > … It is multidisciplinary, combining elements of different fields,
> including:
> > ý anthropological lenses on the culture of schools and classrooms and
> kids' lives inside and outside them
> > ý developmental and cognitive psychology lenses on learning
> > ý sociological lenses on school institutions and school change.
> > There are also important design elements that this type of research
> entails:
> > … Long-term collaborations with educators. Teachers must be partners
> and co-constructors of the innovations and of the research process,
> rather than being viewed as subjects or passive recipients of the innovation.
> > … Systemic integration and research on the impact of innovations needs
> to occur across multiple levels of the school system.
> >
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 23 2000 - 09:21:16 PDT