Cultural
Connections: A Model for Eliminating Boundaries and Crossing Borders
Lauren Cifuentes
Department of
Educational Curriculum and Instruction
College of Education
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX
77843-4232, USA
Phone: (409) 845-7806
e-mail: laurenc@tamu.edu
Karen Murphy
Department of
Educational Curriculum and Instruction
College of Education
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX
77843-4232, USA
Phone: (409) 845-0987
e-mail: kmurphy@tamu.edu
Running Head: Cultural
Connections
Word Count: 7,469
Cultural
Connections: A Model for Eliminating Boundaries and Crossing Borders
Abstract
Cultural
Connections is a model for implementing constructivist, intercultural distance
learning partnerships. This article describes research and development on
cultural connections via telecommunications with-- a middle school partnership
within Texas, a fourth-grade connection between Texas and Mexico, and a
connection between university students in Texas and Taiwan. In these three
partnerships, students expanded their worldviews. The partnerships were
designed to facilitate world citizenship for all participants. Respect for
differences and similarities among learners fundamentally infused the
activities. In the three Cultural Connections partnerships, bonds were
established and strengthened among members of intercultural learning
communities through curricular activities facilitated by telecommunications.
In order to strengthen
bonds among the members of expanding learning communities, administrators,
teachers, and students in learner-centered schools and universities must honor
diversity and emphasize the similarities that foster unity. Cultural
Connections was established in 1995 to promote collaboration and intercultural
understanding among teachers and students across geographic distances. In
Cultural Connections partnerships, educators who are separated by distance
collaboratively generate curricular activities for their students. The students
then conduct the activities via telecommunications.
Cultural Connections
provides educators with meaningful applications of telecommunications as well
as opportunities to build professional relationships with other educators
across diverse school and university sites. Students explore and present their
artwork and ideas about literature as well as their solutions to scientific and
mathematical problems to culturally diverse audiences using telecommunications.
They have opportunities to respond to presentations and instruction of distant
students and to get feedback about their own ideas, thus enhancing curricular
activities as well as heightening awareness of diversity and multiple
perspectives.
Theoretical
Framework
By
collaborating across distances, students from different locations can help each
other learn by sharing experiences and ideas about issues of importance to them
(Cummins & Sayers, 1995). Similar K-12 distance learning projects have been
implemented successfully and discussed in the literature. For instance, in
SAXophone, students connected between England, Finland, Greece, Norway, Sweden,
and the United States to conduct a number of activities via email and
videoconference (Mizell, 1999). The SAXophone students reacted positively to
online and video experiences such as a virtual field trip to the Johnson Space
Center in Houston for an exchange with astronauts and training personnel. On
the Web site, Kidlink’s Multicultural Calendar, students from different
countries add information to a database about holidays celebrated where they
live. Students can search this database by month, holiday, country,
user-supplied keywords, and author to learn about holidays (Kidlink, 1998). In
a study of telecommunications, cross-classroom collaboration structures, or
“Learning Circles,” were found to reduce isolation and broaden students’
experiences by providing opportunities to learn from diverse perspectives
(Riel, 1995). In another study of an email exchange with adult mentors, high
school students in rural Ohio realized that “[t]he components of a meaningful
life had apparently changed as a result of their interaction with others from
outside their usual circle of contacts” (Tille & Hall, 1998, p. 116).
Cultural
Connections makes a special contribution beyond these studies by fostering
relationships among teachers and students as they communicate across distances
for curricular activity. The teachers team-teach and the students learn across
the curriculum in two distant classrooms treated as one. Cultural Connections
is based on the perspective that the experiences and ideas of all students can
be used as a foundation for learning and growing. Three theoretical assumptions
frame this project: 1) social constructivist pedagogy can foster personal
growth and construction of meaning; 2) intercultural communication can broaden
personal understanding as well as increase understanding of others; and 3)
telecommunications can facilitate learning across boundaries and borders.
Social
constructivism is the paradigm or worldview that recognizes learning as the
process of constructing meaning about, or making sense of, our experiences.
According to Vygotsky (1978), our interpretation of the world is derived
largely from the social environment in which we experience events. Vygotsky's
notions encompass the transformation of students into independent thinkers
through a social interaction process mediated by language.
In the current
social-constructivist conception of learning, "education is the shared way
of thinking about one's self, the community, and the world" (Riel, 1995).
However, social, geographic, and cultural isolation can limit opportunities for
relationship building beyond one's culture. To facilitate building a broad
worldview in students, educators need to provide collaborative learning
experiences for social construction of meaning. In order for students to
transform into more tolerant and respectful citizens-- one of the most
important functions of education-- learners need to develop relationships with
people from diverse cultures and backgrounds. Often, the experiences of some
students are foreign to those of others and of their teachers; understanding
may be limited between the different racial, cultural and socioeconomic groups
that comprise schools, universities, and communities (Zey, Luedke, &
Murdock, 1999). However, when students can exchange ideas about home life,
goals, thoughts and values, likes and abilities, and personal stories, they are
provided the opportunity to reflect critically upon their understandings of
their own experiences in social contexts beyond their immediate communities
(Cifuentes & Murphy, In press).
In
constructivist learning environments, the instructor provides the overall
structure and the parameters for the course, while the environment centers
around the student. Students in such learner-centered environments construct
their own learning within the framework of classes in attempts to make sense of
their experiences. This process facilitates students’ creation of their own
particular learning methods, ones that address their individual needs (Wilson,
1996).
Intercultural Communication
Intercultural is defined as
“heterogeneity in … participants’ worldview, normative patterns of belief and
overt behaviors, verbal and nonverbal code system, and perceived relation and
intent” (Kim, 1988, p. 13). Learning environments composed of
intercultural learners can foster real understanding between peoples on
opposite sides of geographic borders. However, intercultural learning
environments can introduce special communication challenges. Researchers from
nine nations identified a strategy for developing world citizens “for whom the
commonwealth is not only a local or national political community but alongside
these, a transnational civic culture concerned with global problems and global
problem solving” (Parker, Ninomiya, & Cogan, 1999, p. 130). The strategy is
based on a multinational curriculum involving instruction on key ethical
concepts, skills related to inquiry and deliberation, and attitudes about
respect for diversity. “Through inquiry, students … search for and interpret
data pertinent … to the [ethical] questions. Through deliberation, they …
clarify the problems, weigh solutions, and in so doing constitute a different
kind of public—an international public—and an additional identity: world
citizen” (p. 141). Parker et al. advocate deliberation as the best method of
deciding the question, “What public action should we as world citizens take?”
According to Hofstede
(1986), interactive styles and values differ among nationalities and cultures
across four dimensions: large vs. small power distance, strong vs. weak
uncertainty avoidance, individualism vs. collectivism, and masculinity vs.
femininity. In addition, communication styles differ across cultural borders.
Hall (1976) distinguishes between high context communication or messages, and
low context communication. In high context cultures such as Mexico and Taiwan,
communication relies on indirect verbal messages that are dependent on context
clues. In these cultures, “very little is in the coded, explicit, transmitted
part of the message” (p. 91). Thus students in high context cultures are likely
to write less and rely more on the physical context. In low context cultures
such as the United States and Germany, on the other hand, messages tend to be
direct, explicit, and highly structured. Understanding these differences could
be critical for telecommunications partners with different cultural styles. Clearly,
there is much to learn from intercultural experience.
When learning takes
place on the Web, further intercultural challenges are presented. According to
Collis and Remmers (1997), four issues are involved in effective intercultural
Web design: communication and interaction, language, content, and
representation form. First, Collis and Remmers note that communication and
interaction are easily misinterpreted across cultures. For example, in intercultural
contexts more communication and interaction are not necessarily better than
less, especially when such activities cause burdens. The authors suggest that
well-structured communication, moderated by an individual with standing, may be
preferable for wider audiences. Second, because language typically includes
both verbal and non-verbal communication, those developing intercultural Web
sites must be sensitive to cultural differences in terms of communication
styles. Issues such as which language(s) to use, translation by multilingual
people, and communication protocols all present potential problems. Third,
Collis and Remmers suggest that course instructors choose content where the
intercultural aspects are either of minimal relevance or else integral to the
content. Fourth, representation form should be considered when using
visualizations to replace or supplement text. Visual resources, more widely
used with advances in multimedia, are subject to potential intercultural
misinterpretation. Addressing well these four intercultural issues, when
interfaced with effective course design, may hold the key to productive
intercultural relationships in computer-mediated communication.
Telecommunications
Learning networks allow students
to virtually cross borders to collaborate with distant others so that they
“actively construct knowledge by formulating ideas into words that are shared
with and built upon through the reactions and responses of others” (Harasim,
Hiltz, Teles, & Turoff, 1995, p. 4). Technology-enhanced cross-classroom
collaboration allows learners to communicate ideas and exchange views with
distant partners whose perspectives might dramatically differ from their own.
By working in networked groups and learning authentic tasks, learners are
encouraged to develop personal meaning. Diverse learners from across
geographically distant locations can even share a multinational curriculum
based on “pressing and complex problems that affect persons across national
boundaries” (Parker et al., 1999, p. 129). Using telecommunications for
deliberation can create “a particular kind of democratic public culture among
the deliberators: listening as well as talking, sharing resources, forging
decisions together rather than only advocating positions taken earlier, and
coming to disagreement” (p. 130).
Telecommunications can
be used to expand the range of exposure to intercultural interactions. In
addition, multimedia technologies can be used for visual/verbal sharing of
ideas across distances. Development of student multimedia portfolios to be
shared with distant others and cross-classroom collaboration foster the
building of intercultural relationships while honoring the strength of
diversity and emphasizing how similarities unify (Cifuentes & Murphy, In
press).
The
Model: Cultural Connections
The purpose of Cultural Connections is to
promote intercultural understanding, self-esteem, and academic achievement in
educational environments among distant partners. This paper describes a distance
learning model from the perspective of university faculty who promote
partnerships and conduct research regarding their impact and ability to
facilitate learning across distances. Within Cultural Connections, university
faculty, school teachers and administrators, and school and university students
collaborate to develop university-school partnerships. Although this paper is
written from the perspective of university faculty, the model itself can be
adapted for use by other educational partners such as administrators in school
districts or businesses.
The literature on university-school
partnerships (Tushnet, 1993) reveals that successful partnerships have a
history of collaboration; they address real problems, acknowledging and
confronting them as they occur; and the partners hold mutual respect for each
other. Successful partnerships also build on conversations with all players to
include discussion about the content of activities. Stakeholders in
university-school partnerships must therefore take the following steps to
ensure success: share goals, interests, and respect; commit to similar content
and ways to deliver the content and use technology; and communicate regularly
to inform each other of progress and to address inevitable problems (Tushnet).
Constructivist theory,
theory of intercultural communication, research findings about successful
partnerships, as well as personal experiences with telecommunications for
learning were applied to create a distance learning model, Cultural
Connections. Although the model is presented linearly, users might modify the
sequence to meet their needs. Several steps may occur simultaneously, and
issues may arise that send the users back to steps listed previously in the
model.
Insert
Figure 1 here
The above model has supported distance
learning among students across Texas where teachers and students have been
collaborating across distances to design and conduct curricular activities
(Cifuentes & Murphy, In press). Similarly, the model has supported distance
learning for Texas students who collaborate with distant partners on activities
across the curriculum in Mexico (Cifuentes & Murphy, 1999), and Taiwan
(Cifuentes & Shih, 1999).
Students who have participated have shown
dramatic improvements in intercultural understanding and self-esteem. Academic
achievement has yet to be measured, but qualitative findings indicate
improvements there as well.
Facilitative
Web Pages
The Cultural Connections
Web site (http://Web.coe.tamu.edu/~cultural) was developed to facilitate
several efforts: it provides the framework for a clearinghouse of distance
learning resources and a virtual environment for collaborators to share ideas
as well as resources. The Web site is
organized by seven key components: project overview, project staff, a
participant directory, student activities, lesson plans, teacher testimonies,
and research.
The participant
directory includes links to participants' e-mail addresses and Web pages,
providing a mechanism for building educator networks and facilitating
collaboration. Moreover, an on-line forum is slated for inclusion in the near
future. The student activity page includes two on-line activities. The student
reflection activity allows them to submit their reflections about their
experiences with their distant partners on-line. The second connections
activity allows students to answer open-ended, culturally based questions and
to submit their responses.
Teachers can also submit
their lesson plans on-line. Finally,
the teacher testimonies page features stories written by teachers and
highlights best practices. This site is unique in that Cultural Connections
collaborators are encouraged to both use and author their own activities,
adding to the richness and diversity of the resources.
The Initial Application
of the Model
The Cultural Connections model was
derived from an initial experience in which teachers in Texas team-taught
across a distance. The first author envisioned multimedia
portfolio development for middle school students in a rural Texas school and
thought that an audience for those portfolios would make the development
process more meaningful. Because the rural school had a dedicated
videoconferencing system, videoconferencing proved the most economical means
for meeting with an audience. A teacher and school administrator shared the
vision and helped to identify a distant partner who also had videoconferencing
capabilities.
An informal needs assessment in the rural
school district preceded a formal needs assessment with the distant partner, a
school on the Mexican border in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. The assessment
included technical and human resources needed at both participating schools to
facilitate multimedia development and videoconferencing. Workshops for teachers
were developed and delivered, sometimes via videoconference, to address
identified needs. In this case, workshops included -- a) HyperStudio™, b)
distance technologies, c) desktop videoconferencing, and d) relationship
building among teachers. During the relationship building videoconference,
sixteen teachers were paired according to their content areas to collaborate on
curricular activities across the two sites. Once the teachers were paired, they
collaboratively developed and scheduled distance learning activities across the
curriculum to be conducted with students. Students created multimedia
portfolios and reflective journals, and they developed surveys as well as
responding to them. Project administrators assisted in initial meetings and
follow-up activities as needed. Finally, during two years of collaborative
activity, the project administrators evaluated the processes and products of
the distance partnership (Cifuentes & Murphy, In press).
Processes and Products
of One Team of K-12 Teachers Within Texas
When asked, "What
is the most important aspect of Cultural Connections?" one teacher in a
partner-school in Texas, immediately answered, "The powerful effects on my
students." She told us stories about her student who won the struggle to
leave gang membership and about others who grew in their abilities to speak
with confidence before a group. Another teacher in a Texan school on the
Mexican border described the pride that her students expressed over their newly
acquired technical skills, and we witnessed that pride in the multimedia
portfolio pieces designed by her students. As a result of participation in
Cultural Connections, the border-school led the state of Texas in number of
videoconferences. Two teachers team-taught across 400 miles. When their
students met, their rooms became one classroom with two facilitators. All
students knew each other's names and considered both teachers to be theirs.
Thus, through Cultural Connections, participating students learned about
others’ perspectives and applied technical expertise to meaningful activity
(Cifuentes & Murphy, In press).
Participants in the
border-school and its partner school to the north prepared for the distance
meetings, met regularly via videoconference during a school year (nine times
between November and May), and created products based upon what they learned.
For instance, in one of the six-week units, “Holidays”, students in both
classes developed multimedia presentations from writing activities in I
Thought I Was From Another Planet (Dresser,
1994), a book designed to help students develop authentic writing voices
and heighten their sensitivity to our intercultural world. They read a story
about St. Patrick’s Day and discussed it via videoconference. Among the related
activities, they designed and delivered presentations on invented holidays,
which they shared via videoconference. The presentations reflected students’
values as they chose to celebrate Einstein Day, Rosa Parks Day, or a day
devoted to another personal hero.
Another shared unit
between the two classes focused on developing skills in social studies
research, descriptive statistics, persuasive writing, and deliberation.
Students conducted library and Internet research on the topic of school
uniforms; surveyed campus students and faculty; analyzed data; and formulated,
developed, wrote, and presented persuasive arguments across the distance. They
then participated in a distance open forum to discuss the pros and cons of
school uniforms. Students in the border-school generally supported school
uniforms, while students in the partner school were generally opposed.
The teachers also
directed their students to create multimedia portfolios in HyperStudio™ , the
multimedia software program used in the project. Students wrote about and
created visual representations of their home lives, their goals, their thoughts
and values, their likes and abilities, and their stories. In addition to the
graphic and audio capabilities of
HyperStudio™, the scrolling text option allowed students to place essays
in their multimedia portfolios. They reflected critically upon their
understanding of their experiences in a social context beyond their immediate
communities. They shared multimedia portfolio pieces with each other via
interactive videoconference. Presentations were projected before the classes
and viewed individually or in small groups. Students stored files as they
generated ideas and received feedback from each other. In addition, and perhaps
most importantly, because multimedia software files are easily edited and
revised, students changed their presentations as they themselves grew and
changed.
A case study approach
was used to examine participants and phenomena in the real-life context of the
schools (Yin, 1984). The students and teachers collaborating between both
distant schools were the participants. Data sources included (a) multimedia
portfolios of the border-school students; (b) written reflections of teachers
at both sites, students at both sites, and university faculty; and (c)
interviews of the border-school students.
Data analyses revealed
that students' positive self-concept and intercultural understanding increased
in response to Cultural Connections. Four themes emerged from the data: growth,
empowerment, comfort with technology, and mentoring. Participants grew
personally and intellectually. They felt empowered to achieve goals. They
became comfortable with technology, and they provided and/or received
mentoring. Students mentored and learned from each other. They also had the
benefit of receiving mentoring from both their local and distant teachers. This
research indicated that distance technologies can foster team-teaching and that
teachers' professional relationships can grow with few face-to-face meetings.
Teachers can plan, reflect upon, and conduct long-term curricular activities
over distances.
Positive teacher
relationships led to opportunities to share planning of distance learning
curricular activities for students. In addition, students matured and acquired
cultural sensitivity as a result of a year of distance learning activity. Their
distance relationships provided opportunities to dispel misconceptions about
distant others by gaining an awareness of both similarities and differences
between themselves and others.
Cross-classroom
collaboration made it possible for young adolescents to expand their worldviews
in preparation for contributing in our increasingly intercultural environment.
This project demonstrated that in networked classrooms students can connect
with people at distant sites within the United States to learn about and from
the perspectives of others and to increase their intercultural understandings.
As the teacher from the partner-school reports about Cultural Connections,
"We all value each other; our students are the winners."
International
Components of Cultural Connections
In 1998 two
international partnerships within Cultural Connections began. These
partnerships connected educators and students in Texas with their counterparts
in Mexico at the K-12 level and in Taiwan at the university level. To
investigate the progress of the collaborative activities across international
boundaries, conducted studies were conducted around these questions: (1) How is
distance team-teaching achieved, what constraints arise, how might these
constraints be overcome, and what is gained? (2) What are distance partners’
views about each other, and do those views shift as a result of collaborative
activity?
K-12 Teachers and Students in Texas and Mexico
Case
study methodologies were used to explore the activities and products of
activities conducted via videoconference by two fourth-grade classes each in
Mexico City and two fourth-grade classes in College Station, Texas (Cifuentes
& Murphy, 1999). The need for collaboration was established through
analysis of poems that students wrote about each other’s cultures prior to any
distance learning activities. The Mexican children spoke English fluently as
they had been in their bilingual school since kindergarten. They also had
enough previous experience with U.S. culture to be able to describe the culture
accurately in poetry. On the other hand, most Texan children knew no Spanish,
had little knowledge of Mexico, and had to write about their own culture or an
imaginary place, or else to refer to stereotypes in order to create a poem.
The
activities in the partnership were unusual in that they were designed to help
the students understand each other’s cultures by walking in each other’s shoes.
First, all four classes attended the poetry writing workshops in which they
wrote poems about the other nation. Second, the students wrote a story of a day
in the life of a fourth-grader in the other country. Both of these activities
were meant to help students establish how much they did or did not know about
each other’s lives so that, as the year progressed, they could set personal
goals for gaining knowledge. In addition, they completed a survey that provided
indications of the values and artistic interests of each child. They also
created student profile sheets that described their families, favorite subjects
in school, favorite foods, and special interests, and also included their
pictures. They shared these poems, stories, surveys, and profiles with each
other via videoconference at the beginning of the partnership; the teachers
then made them available during the school year. Because most of these
documents were not electronic and the mail system was insecure, they used a
messenger who traveled between Mexico and Texas regularly for unrelated
business purposes.
As in the Texas
partnership, several of the curricular activities were stimulated by the book I
Felt Like I Was From Another Planet (Dresser, 1994). For example, in a
pilot study conducted the previous year, students conducted an activity on
table manners with the goals of learning about:
Cultural adaptations
through imitation and trial and error; cultural relativity—not being judgmental
about other people’s ways; the influence of cultural rules and customs that
have been informally and unconsciously learned and accepted, yet rarely
questioned; and what is acceptable and approved in one culture yet might be
offensive or unacceptable elsewhere (p. 47).
The participating classes then met twice in
90-minute videoconferences to introduce themselves, show collages of images
representing their family and interests, and share personal ancestry. After
these meetings, students were able to discuss their cultural similarities and
differences and could recognize the differences in levels of knowledge about
each other’s cultures discussed earlier in this paper.
A third 90-minute
videoconference was designed to help students understand the interpretive
nature of history and the role that perspective plays in that interpretation.
Students conducted an activity on what Texans call “The Texas Revolution” with
the objectives of enabling them to— (1) describe why the battle of the Alamo
occurred, (2) create a dramatic representation of the battle, and (3) write an
essay comparing the U.S. and Mexican interpretations of the story of the Alamo.
Prior to the videoconference, students read a short story written by the first
author, “The Battle of Cottonwood Ridge,” associated with events of the battle
of the Alamo. To encourage objectivity, the names Mexico, Texas, and the Alamo
were changed. Students pretended to be present at the battle: they picked
sides, and wrote a diary entry about what they did, why, and what happened to
them. Only 6 Mexicans and 11 Texans chose to be on the Texas side, while 38
Mexicans and 31 Texans picked Mexico’s side. At that point, the teachers
revealed to their students that they had read about the battle of the Alamo of
1836 and that Mexico and Texas were involved.
Next, students read the
chapters about the period of the Revolution from both the Texas and Mexican
texts and conducted supportive reading activities. The Mexican text was
translated to English for the American students. The classes independently
identified similarities and differences between the stories told in the texts.
Then, each student wrote a comparative essay regarding Mexican and Texan
interpretations of the Texas Revolution. In small groups students developed
brief reenactments of a story about the Alamo.
Teachers from each site
selected the “best” diary entry, comparative essay, and reenactment for
presentation to the distant audience. During the fourth 90-minute
videoconference, students alternated across sites to read their diary entries,
perform their reenactments, and read their comparative essays. After the
videoconference, they discussed what they remembered from the diaries,
reenactments, and essays, and then they reviewed what was learned about the
reasons for and events of the battle of the Alamo and the different
perspectives of Mexico and the United States.
Approximately
a month after the videoconference in which students explored the 1836 battle
for Texas, the classes acted out folktales and sang folksongs with each other
via a fifth 90-minute videoconference. In preparation for another
videoconference, they created murals, shared pictures of murals in their city
and town, and discussed their contents. Each student collected a list of images
in the murals of each other’s countries and then compared the types of images
used. The classes also had planned a final videoconference to exchange recipes
and party traditions and have a shared celebration-- a fiesta for the Texans
and a party for the Mexicans. Due to complicated schedules, this meeting was
canceled.
The
students participated fully in the above activities and took great interest in
each other. Through the activities they tried to get inside the shoes of the
other culture and become curious about each other’s perspectives. Each of the
activities initiated by the project led to a flood of student questioning
regarding the life of the distant others. Thus the children were brought
together for greater understanding of the many ways in which they were both
similar to and different from each other.
The Texan fourth-grade
students’ lack of knowledge of Mexican culture contrasted sharply with the
Mexican students’ high level of knowledge of U.S. culture. This contrast may be
explained in part by the socioeconomic status of the Mexican students, who
attended an exclusive private school and had extensive opportunities in both
language learning and world travel. The Texan students, who attended a public
school, were quite diverse in their socioeconomic status and limited in their
exposure to other languages and travel opportunities.
Preservice Teachers in Texas and Students of
English in Taiwan
To prepare U.S.
preservice teachers for online teaching and reaching diverse learners, and to
provide English instruction to Taiwanese students, American and Taiwanese university
students corresponded via email. The American preservice teachers explored the
theory and practice of online instruction, corresponded as tutors to teach
English language and American culture, and reflected upon their experiences.
Taiwanese students practiced English and exchanged cultural information.
Research on this collaborative project explored documentation of
correspondences and journal entries about the perceived impact of each
correspondence in order to identify the benefits and limitations of online
teaching and learning, online teaching strategies, and cultural aspects
associated with intercultural collaboration.
The 37 American
students-- who were preparing to teach English, social studies, political
science, economics and/or history at the secondary level-- were paired with
Taiwanese students majoring in English language and literature. Preparation for
the difficult task of online teaching included providing the Americans with a
lecture, discussion, supportive readings, example tutorial correspondences, and
a web site of resources. The digital pictures of the Americans and Taiwanese
students on the Web site facilitated social presence (Gunawardena, 1994) during
online correspondence. In addition, the Web site (http://www.eng.fju.tw/cultural_connections.htm)
included a downloadable lecture, the expected online correspondence process
guidelines, a formative evaluation survey, sample correspondences, and samples
of participants’ reflections. The Americans read on topics such as effective facilitation
of computer conferencing (Berge, 1997; Cifuentes, Murphy, Segur, & Kodali,
1997), interactivity in online environments (Gunawardena, 1992), and
transactional distance (Moore, 1993). In addition, a FirstClass™ electronic
bulletin-board system was used to model online instruction in mock tutorials.
Americans studied how to develop lessons using an instructional design model
(Gagne, Briggs, & Wager, 1992) and “lurked” during the demonstration of the
delivery of sample online lessons in language and social studies.
The American students
corresponded weekly with their partners in Taiwan and sent at least eight
messages during two months. They began by introducing themselves and their
intention to provide instruction in the English language and American culture.
In a second message, they established the needs of their keypals by 1) asking
what their partners needed to learn and how they might help, and 2) examining
samples of their partners’ writing to ascertain their capabilities. The rest of
the correspondences (a minimum of six) were supposed to include instruction in
the English language and exchanges of information about American and Taiwanese
cultures. The Americans began instructing their partners while attending to
their capability levels.
Similarly, Taiwanese
students were to introduce themselves in the first letter. The second message was to explain their
needs of assistance from their partners and to help the Americans establish
learning goals that ranged from understanding Shakespeare’s English, practicing
conversational English, and reading novels, to becoming acquainted with
American culture. The subsequent messages were to interact with the Americans
on the selected goals.
Data sources for
analyzing the partnership included the following: (a) printouts of the
correspondences, (b) American’s formative evaluations, (c) American’s
reflective journal entries, and (d) surveys of Taiwanese partners. Through
ethnographic methods it was found that the authentic experiences designed to
meet the objectives of both the Americans and the Taiwanese students’ courses
proved effective. The American students learned about teaching online as well
as teaching in general by applying instructional strategies with real learners.
At the same time, the Taiwanese students received instruction from native
English language speakers and were able to communicate within the American
culture. Such authenticity could only be attained through application of
distance technologies. As a result of their experiences, participants
constructed elaborate understandings of the cultures of teaching and language
learning. An unplanned outcome was that several partners declared their
intention to continue their distance relationships long after the course.
This research indicated
that educational endeavors are wise to infuse authentic activities facilitated
by telecommunications technologies into their curricula. Such infusion becomes
possible as more schools go online. In this partnership, benefits derived from
telecommunications infusion included learning how to use telecommunications to
increase expertise in content areas under study, providing for individualized
instruction, improving language and communication skills in English, and
providing for cultural exchange.
However, limitations of
telecommunications infusion may arise. Participants may feel a lack of humanity
in the telecommunications environment and, as a result become unresponsive or
resentful of the demands on their time. In addition, they may feel unqualified
to meet course objectives via email correspondence. To overcome these
limitations, instructors should provide substantial opportunities for
interaction among partners. Synchronous chats and videoconferencing can enhance
the human relationship, already established through email. Instructors should
also provide guidance for teaching and learning online. Such guidance might
include examination of effective online teaching as well as modeling each of
the strategies for online teaching (Cifuentes & Shih, 1999).
The most effective
online teaching and learning among partners in this study included application
of a variety of strategies and frequent messaging and strategy use. While some
Americans used a variety of strategies and provided excellent instruction,
their Taiwanese partners were not necessarily responsive. At the same time,
other Americans did not provide quality instruction for some Taiwanese students
who were ready and willing to learn. Thus, some pairs were not as effective as
they could have been, due to lack of participation on the part of one partner.
Moreover, motivation can impact the extent of participation in distance
learning. For some participants, distance collaboration was difficult and
time-consuming. When the participants perceived that the amount of learning did
not match the effort expended, or that the concepts learned were irrelevant to
their personal goals, they lost their motivation. However, when both the
Americans and Taiwanese students were motivated and devoted to the partnership,
they taught better and learned more. The more the pairs interacted through
writing, the more they practiced teaching and learning; and more practice led
to higher perceived effectiveness.
This research identified
categories of instructional strategies that can guide further teacher
preparation efforts and indicated that use of the full range of strategies is
most effective in online environments. Strategies identified were: facilitative
information, questions and answers from tutor to student, questions and answers
from student to tutor, topic discussion, problem solving, critique of writing,
and recommendations for metacognition. Future research can expand upon this
list of strategies and investigate methods to prepare teachers to apply all
identified strategies.
Online learning
environments lend themselves well to constructivist learning in that
transactional distance (Moore, 1993) encourages teachers to maintain a
facilitative rather than an authoritative role. In this partnership, the most
effective tutors took a facilitative role by providing their partners with
“facilitative information” in the form of references to resources so that the
learners could go beyond the partnership to learn on their own.
Problem-solving
strategies distinguished the highly effective from the less effective
correspondences. Although the highly effective pairs provided less critique of
writing than did the less effective, this does not indicate that critique
should be avoided in correspondence. In fact, based upon this research, critique
of writing coupled with appropriate problem solving strategies in response to
the language problems identified in the critique are recommended. Developing
problem solving exercises involves more time and creativity on the part of the
teacher than does a simple critique, but appears to pay off in the learners’
perception of teacher effectiveness.
Discussion
The
Cultural Connections model was applied to implement constructivist,
intercultural distance learning partnerships within Texas and between Texas
students and students in Mexico, and Taiwan. In the three partnerships
described in this paper, students participated in distance learning activities
that expanded their worldviews. The partnerships were designed to facilitate
world citizenship for each individual who participated in collaborative
Cultural Connections activities. Respect for differences as well as
similarities among learners fundamentally infused the activities. Although
Postman (1995) expresses concern that technology isolates people, distance
technologies can be used to achieve the desirable “End(s) of Education” that
Postman describes: “to find and promote large, inclusive narratives for all
students to believe in” (p. 144), and “to help the young transcend individual
identity by finding inspiration in a story of humanity” (p. 171). In the three
Cultural Connections partnerships, bonds were established and strengthened
among members of intercultural learning communities through curricular
activities facilitated by telecommunications.
These cases of national
and international team-teaching provide the basis for a cohesive model that
others can use to expand their learning communities within and beyond national
borders. This model, with 12 fluid steps, reflects experiences with management
of expanding learning communities using telecommunications. Each implementation
of the model provided new insight into answers to the important questions
raised earlier: (1) How is distance team-teaching achieved, what constraints
arise, how might these constraints be overcome, and what is gained? (2) What
are distance partners’ views about each other, and do those views shift as a
result of collaborative activity? The stories of these experiences provide
insight into the impact of such expanded learning communities on educators and
their students.
Within Cultural
Connections, international team-teaching was achieved for different reasons. In
the partnership with Mexico, an existing videoconferencing infrastructure
provided for free and unlimited connections between classrooms in Texas and
Mexico City. A Taiwanese graduate student in Texas initiated the Taiwanese
partnership with her instructor in the United States and her undergraduate
professor in Taiwan. When all constituencies were involved in each phase of the
Cultural Connections model, team-teaching proved to be successful; teachers and
students participated enthusiastically in activities and acknowledged learning
above and beyond what was possible in their self-contained classrooms.
However, successful partnerships can be
constrained by cultural differences in interactive styles as well as values
among distant partners. For instance, in the Taiwanese connection, the most
effective partnerships were those in which the American tutors adopted the role
of the effective teacher by applying multiple strategies and by frequent
messaging. On the other hand, the preservice teachers who resisted taking on
the role of the teacher and instead chose to correspond by initiating friendly
topic discussions proved less effective in their language teaching. This
phenomenon regarding the role of the teachers is consistent with Hofstede’s
(1986) theory that describes a large “power distance” between teachers and
learners in Mexico and Taiwan, and a small “power distance” between teachers
and learners in the U.S. In the two cases under discussion, the international
learning partners tolerated unequal power between teachers and learners while
U.S. learners did not.
Acknowledgement and
awareness of cultural differences together with shared planning can help
developers to overcome the constraints associated with intercultural
partnerships. To prepare for an intercultural, telecommunications partnership,
administrators and learners are well advised to read about intercultural communication
(e.g., Goodman, 1994), successful partnerships (e.g., Tushnet, 1993), and
computer conferencing (Berge, 1997). Additionally, activities such as creating
Web biographies and moderating computer conferences help to overcome
constraints.
The partners involved in
the Cultural Connections activities gained in a variety of ways. Those within
Texas acknowledged growth, felt empowered, gained comfort with technology, and
experienced mentoring relationships. Their positive self-concepts and
intercultural understandings increased. Within the Texas-Taiwan connection,
participants identified and applied strategies for online partnerships and for
online teaching and learning. In all three cases, positive teacher
relationships proved critical; teachers gained professionalism through their
relationships. Strong administrative support is also crucial to developing and
maintaining relationships.
By connecting with
people of other cultures, participants grew in their understanding of each
other’s cultures, thereby dispelling misconceptions about distant others and
expanding their worldviews. In the Texas-Mexico partnership, this growth was
accomplished by having the students walk in each other’s footsteps. In each
partnership, shared multiple perspectives helped students to construct ideas
about issues related to their curriculum. Prior to distance collaboration,
participants particularly within Texas knew little about how they were both
similar and different from their partners. As a result of the partnerships,
their views about distant others shifted. Students acknowledged gaining
understanding of each other’s cultures within Texas, and in the case of Texas
andTaiwan, they also gained understanding of each other as individuals.
Students who are “provided opportunities
to collaborate across cultural and linguistic boundaries in the generation,
interpretation, and application of knowledge” (Nieto, 1992) are likely to
become world citizens, as advocated by Parker, Ninomiya, and Cogan (1999). It
is through partnerships such as these in Cultural Connections that
telecommunications can contribute to world citizenship by eliminating
boundaries and helping people virtually cross borders.
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The Cultural Connections Model 1. establish a vision for
expanding the learning community; 2. assess needs; 3. identify distant
partners; 4. communicate the vision
among teachers and administrators across sites; 5. identify existing
activities or develop new ones in response to the identified needs; 6. identify existing or
develop new professional development workshops needed to support envisioned
activities, such as: · relationship building,
intercultural communication, and collaboration over distances, · meeting the Texas
Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) through distance learning, · instructional
applications of telecommunications (e.g., interactive and desktop
videoconferencing, the Web), · multimedia
development, and · development of
distance learning activities; 7. conduct professional
development workshops as needed and just-on-time; 8. connect teachers with
distant partners who share interests; 9. design, develop, and
schedule distance learning activities; 10. assist students in
developing products to share for purposes of distance learning; 11. collaboratively
structure initial meetings and follow-up activities; and 12. plan and implement documentation
and evaluation strategies. |
|
Figure 1. Cultural
Connections Distance Learning Model |