The three Action Research Cycles allowed me to examine questions about my actions in Tech Club this year, and how I might make Tech Club a more inclusive environment that allowed collaboration and aesthetic choice through technology use.
My Cycle One questions focused on transforming Tech Club into an inclusive environment. Students learned to use digital cameras during our first project. Collaboration was encouraged as students took photos that captured images of their school and its students. I experimented with scheduling as a means of ensuring equitable use of the limited equipment available. Girls were very receptive to the project, and five girls completed the project by taking photos, cropping and captioning them, then building web pages to display the photos. However, only one student on the Autism Spectrum participated. Students built valuable digital literacy skills during this project. My Cycle One questions reflected my interest in making Tech Club more inclusive.
How might Tech Club be modified to better consider the voice of girls, and what kinds of activities would better suit girls' interests?
How might students on the Autism Spectrum benefit from a program such as Tech Club?
Cycle Two of my Action Research concerned promoting the work Tech Club was doing through podcasts. Additionally, I wanted to explore Real Simple Syndication and whether it would facilitate the distribution of our work. Girls' participation in the first project built a core group that continued with the podcasting project. These girls brought their friends to Tech Club to help record and produce podcasts. Additionally, students on the Autism Spectrum participated with increased frequency. Boys continued to participate as well, working on podcast segments that encouraged collaboration and strengthened reading and writing skills in addition to building digital literacy. The number of students who participated in Tech Club increased during this cycle, too, and the podcast medium proved exceptionally empowering for these students.
Would podcasting inspire new student participation in Tech Club and inform parents about the benefits of constructivist, collaborative technology projects?
Could I leverage RSS technology to get the podcasts onto people's computers?
My Cycle Three Action Research project created a Tech Club project that encouraged students to take leadership positions. Students created digital video films that captured their imaginations. The projects were long-term and required collaboration with a diverse group of students. Some students emerged as leaders during this project, directing films and organizing students to realize their projects. This project built on the digital literacy skills the students learned during their work on the previous projects.
Can I empower students to assumed leadership roles through technology use in group projects?
Will video serve as a medium to help students on the Autism Spectrum increase their level of communication with other students?
How might student-directed projects like this one encourage students to assume leadership positions within Tech Club?
Action Research Scenario
My actions this year were intended to create an equitable, inclusive environment where students could better communicate through their use of various technologies. Technology use would develop the students' digital literacy, which might empower them and allow them differentiated means of communicating with their peers and the world.
I encouraged girls to participate by creating equitable working conditions. Tech Club's first project, digital photography, revealed that I needed to schedule the use of the digital cameras and laptops because of the limited availability of equipment. Scheduling equipment use created equitable amounts of time for students to use the equipment. Additionally, some students, like Beth, took advantage of the scheduling and gained additional time with the equipment by using other students' time when they missed their scheduled sessions. The podcasting and digital video projects similarly allowed girls equitable use of equipment and opportunities to create segments or films. Delegating equipment and scheduling space, time and access to my skills were important considerations I made this year.
I de-emphasized technology in favor of collaborative projects that honored aesthetic choice to try to make Tech Club more appealing to girls and to allow students on the Autism Spectrum to develop new communication skills. The digital photography, podcasting, and digital video projects all allowed students to express themselves individually while working collaboratively on the projects. Projects like the digital photograph web pages students constructed allowed for the multimedia choices that girls value in technology projects. Podcasting allowed students to demonstrate their knowledge on subjects that they found interesting and created a context for learning that was personal and relevant to the individual student. The movie-making project also allowed students to make creative choices and present artistic visions of imaginary worlds. Oftentimes the work that Tech Club engaged in looked more like play than serious effort. The students were very engaged in the process as they learned new skills that built digital literacy, like digital photography or stop-motion animation.
I also wanted to make Tech Club a place where students on the Autism Spectrum might interact with their peers and build digital literacy that would allow them to better communicate. I tried to leverage several Autistic students' interests in technology in projects like podcasting that used technology to improve individuals' abilities to communicate with a larger audience. Two Autistic students used the digital literacy skills they built working with other Tech Club students to create stop-motion films of their own. Digital literacy brings differentiated means of communicating, and these Autistic students used technology to better communicate their imaginations and emotions through their participation in Tech Club projects like podcasting and stop-motion movie-making.
I also sought to encourage leadership through technology use in group projects. Both Henry and Beth directed films and collaborated with other Tech Club members on complex projects that demanded existing digital literacy and built additional skills like editing digital video and audio. Rachel and another third grade girl, Vanessa, worked with other students on Tech Club projects before making a stop-motion film of their own. Vanessa's projects were mostly collaborative: she built a web page with another girl, helped produce props for Beth's film, and acted in Henry's film. Tech Club projects this year allowed for such collaboration. However, she also created her own podcast segment and worked with Rachel to create a stop-motion film, wrote the film's script on her own and built the sets with her friends. This student used collaborative projects to build the skills necessary to lead a project of her own.
These deliberate actions combined to form an intentional transformative process that I hoped would make Tech Club more inclusive and involve more girls and students on the Autism Spectrum.
I expected that I would be able to transform Tech Club this year into a more inclusive and equitable learning community in which students could build digital literacy. These expectations were based on the actions I took over the course of the year and the adjustments I made to my actions based on the students' reactions.
I expected that I could create equity through scheduling the use of equipment like laptops, digital cameras, and digital video equipment. Early in the digital photography assignment, when it was clear that boys were dominating the use of the digital cameras, I created sign-up sheets to make sure everyone received fifteen minutes of hands-on time with the cameras. Similarly, the students had scheduled time to use the laptops to crop and title their images before building web pages with them. The same project also encouraged equitable use of technology by girls and boys because the project honored aesthetic choice and allowed students to collaborate. This group work created and nurtured relationships between the students as they helped one another learn to use the equipment and the software.
There were few artistic outlets outside classroom activities for students during school hours at this school. Tech Club projects were very multimedia-oriented. Students used technology to create photos, music, and films. They also used technology to facilitate the writing and editing process and to capture their performances. I expected that the transformation of Tech Club into a group where students could be creative and playful would provide students opportunities for self-expression.
I also expected I would be able to transform Tech Club because I was committed to stepping back this year and letting the students guide the projects and their outcomes. As my Action Research progressed I examined a servant leadership style in which my foremost responsibility was to meet the needs of the students so they could complete their projects. Instead of being an instructor this year, I tried to be a facilitator, somebody Tech Club students could use as a resource as they worked on their projects. Instead of guiding every outcome, I tried to let the students determine the content they produced.
I encountered a few problems and difficulties in my Action Research. Group work confirmed that boys tend to dominate the use of computers or other equipment. I tried to make access to the equipment equitable by scheduling the use of five digital cameras and four laptop computers among seventeen students. It could be difficult at times to get the Autistic students to collaborate and work together on a project: Henry, for example, was unable to work on the soundtrack for Paul's film with Rachel because she had a lesser understanding of the software and Henry was unable to explain it to her. To provide Rachel an equitable experience I suggested she compose the soundtrack for the movie she and Vanessa planned to make.
Time was a constraint for me this year, an issue I noted in my Action Research Plan Force Field Map at the beginning of the program. There was not enough continuous time available during the school day during which Tech Club could meet. I modified the meeting schedule so students could work during all three recesses if they wanted, not just lunch recess. During the stop-motion film project and the podcasting unit, this flexibility allowed the projects to occur because of the number of participants and the complexity of the projects. The supplemental contract for Tech Club allows for seventy-two hours of work during the course of the school year. This amount of time was too short to adequately meet the needs of the students and to build digital literacy, so I worked beyond the contract.
I solved the space issue, also noted in the Action Research Plan Force Field Map, by moving Tech Club from the Occupational Therapy room to the Library, which was a much more public space. This change in location might have positively affected Tech Club participation by making our activities more public. During the podcasting and moving-making units students used my office so they could record their voices with little background noise or leave models set up mid-scene when they returned to their classrooms. Students also worked to solve the space issue. Beth realized when she filmed her movie that the on-site before and after school-care room was unused during the school day, and used the room for some of the scenes of her movie where she needed a kitchen and a bedroom, for example.
I was surprised by the success of the students in Tech Club this year as a result of my actions. The students who participated in the projects learned valuable digital literacy skills that they applied in their classrooms and at home. Their collaborative efforts allowed them to accomplish large projects in less time than they had in the past because of some students fluency in aspects of digital literacy. I did not try to guide every action this year and acted as a facilitator rather than an instructor. The students responded by leading the projects and working together to build digital literacy and relationships.
The reactions to my actions this year were extremely positive. There was better participation by girls: twenty-three girls participated in Tech Club projects this year, including four who participated in all three projects. Participation by students on the Autism Spectrum also increased, from one last year to three students participating in projects and creating their own. Tracking the number of times the RSS file was accessed suggested that parents and community members were listening to Tech Club's podcasts: in one month there was over one thousand "hits" on the RSS file used to subscribe to the podcast. Tech Club was mentioned as a student activity in a brochure distributed to every elementary school in the state during a principal recruitment search for the school. Finally, I believe that the students who emerged as leaders and directed films or hosted podcast episodes are encouraging reactions. These students built digital literacy skills as well as leadership skills through their collaborative work.
My work this year utilized Action Research. The Pepperdine OMET Cadre Revolution 9 developed a working definition of Action Research. Action research is a recognized form of experimental research that focuses on the effects of the researcher's direct actions of practice within a participatory community with the goal of improving the performance quality of the community or an area of concern (Dick, 2002; Reason & Bradbury, 2001; Hult & Lennung, 1980; McNiff, 2002). Action research involves utilizing a systematic cyclical method of planning, taking action, observing, evaluating (including self-evaluation) and critical reflecting prior to planning the next cycle (O'Brien, 2001; McNiff, 2002). The actions have a set goal of addressing an identified problem in the workplace, for example, reducing the illiteracy of students through use of new strategies (Quigley, 2000). It is a collaborative method to test new ideas and implement action for change. It involves direct participation in a dynamic research process, while monitoring and evaluating the effects of the researcher's actions with the aim of improving practice (Dick, 2002; Checkland & Holwell, 1998; Hult & Lennung, 1980). At its core, action research is a way to increase understanding of how change in one's actions or practices can mutually benefit a community of practitioners (McNiff, 2002; Reason & Bradburym, 2001; Carr & Kremmis 1986; Masters, 1995).
Projects in which students directed the outcomes were more successful and encouraged longer-term participation than projects in which I directed the outcomes. Comparing the commitment and dedication students exhibited in the movie-making project versus the digital photography project, for example, shows that when students were directing the projects and outcomes they were more committed. The digital photography project allowed for individual choice, but I guided the process. Seven students who took photos never completed the cropping, titling, or web page construction part of the project. Perhaps one reason is that part of the process did not interest them. All the students who worked on Paul's film participated through the duration of the project. There were exceptions in student-directed projects, however. Beth's film was for a time plagued with defecting cast members and students who decided they would rather go to recess than rehearse for her film. Perhaps she placed too many demands on the other students, causing them to quit the production. The podcasting project was another example of a project that generated interest initially, but once students tired of the process and exhausted the topics in which they were interested it was difficult to get anyone to host an episode or generate any new material. Rather than trying to re-generate interest, I transitioned the students to the next project. Leadership of Tech Club, whether by me or by students, needed to strike a balance between facilitating others in the group to accomplish projects and overtly leading students to a pre-conceived conclusion, like building a web page or finishing a film.
Tech Club and the digital literacy skills students built this year provided alternative means for Autistic students to communicate. Lord and McGee (2003) note that without adults deliberately planning and structuring a social environment, many Autistic students will not exhibit ordinary social exchanges with their peers. Projects like podcasting and movie-making encouraged students on the Autism Spectrum to participate by building on their interests and skills they already possessed. Involving Autistic students in others students' projects allowed them to build social skills as well as digital literacy, which empowered them to create their own projects. Podcasting allowed Larry to share a song he wrote, a skill very few of his peers knew he possessed. Henry's musical abilities were showcased in the soundtrack he composed. The stop-motion film that Larry produced also allowed him to communicate a narrative that would have otherwise been trapped in his mind. I believe I was successful in encouraging these students to participate because the differentiated means of communicating appealed to these students and appeared to provide the necessary context for learning digital literacy skills.
Encouraging all the students who participated in Tech Club projects to create their knowledge through hands-on constructivist projects was effective. Unlike past years, I did not set out to overtly teach students to use technology. Rather, they built digital literacy by using technology to accomplish projects based on aesthetic choice, collaboration, and artistic license. This shift from instructor to facilitator was an important action I took this year.
I believe that the transformation of Tech Club into a more inclusive environment was possible for a number of reasons. Constructivism, an educational theory that "describes how people construct their reality and make sense of their world," guided much of my work this year (Lambert et al., 2002). By treating the learner as a constructor of knowledge I encouraged students to construct their own meanings through their experiences and activities. Tech Club projects built on the experiences and understandings the students brought to Tech Club, and gave them new experiences in order to build and refine their digital literacy skills. Working as a group provided a social activity that was enhanced by the shared inquiry of the group and the contributions each student made to the projects. Building on Vygotsky's notion of the Zone of Proximal Development, "the space or field among learners and teachers in which individuals negotiate meaning and create knowledge and intelligence," I tried to make Tech Club a place where students of different ages, with different skills and abilities, might meet to construct knowledge and build digital literacy skills in the process (Lambert et al., 2002). I also tried to take a constructivist leadership approach, enabling Tech Club students to construct meanings through their work and to develop a shared purpose in our work.
Modeling a leadership style that emphasized the importance of meeting others' needs influenced the students and in some cases allowed students to assume leadership positions, too. The servant leadership model that I demonstrated through my Cycle Three actions, in which the leader works to meet other people's highest priority needs, influenced the students (Gosling et al., 2003, citing Greenleaf 1970). Servant leadership promotes "collaboration, trust, foresight, listening, and the ethical use of power and empowerment" (Gosling et al., 2003, citing Center for Servant Leadership web site, 2003). Using this model was particularly effective for the movie-making project because of the amount of work required to complete the project. I worked hard to meet the needs of the student directors, and they in turn worked hard to meet the needs of their casts and crews.
Projects that encouraged differentiated communication helped transform Tech Club into a more inclusive environment. Digital photography, podcasting, and movie-making were all projects that allowed individual voices to emerge and be heard. Students on the Autism Spectrum had new opportunities to share their imaginations and to showcase their singing skills in the podcasting project. Tech Club projects this year allowed students to explore various types of media and to capture their voices and imaginations in myriad ways. Everyone found a voice through their work in Tech Club.
The apprenticeship model scaffolds student development and helps students develop within a framework of proximal development. Tasks are slightly beyond the students' current abilities at the beginning of a project. The support of the community allows the individual student to further develop her or his skills and make the stretch of skills necessary to achieve and build new literacies. Papert (1993) believed that becoming literate "means thinking differently than one did previously, seeing the world differently," and I believe that Tech Club projects had this effect on the students. Not only were the students building digital literacy, but they build social literacy, leadership literacy, and collaborative literacy as well, supporting Papert's contention that there are different literacies (1993). Providing students authentic learning experiences, where knowledge was built through hands-on projects, helped these students acquire new technology skills.
Finally, I believe that interactive media encouraged participation by allowing individual voices to emerge and be heard. The students' projects took advantage of many new technologies, from digital photography and web page building to podcasting and movie making. All the projects encouraged students to actively participate in the creation of a product, which in turn helped create knowledge. The success of Tech Club rested in the ability for so many different students' voices to be heard through their projects.
Early in the Pepperdine program, I developed my Action Research Project Plan. I decided transforming Tech Club into a more inclusive group would be the goal of my Action Research. Of the issues facing elementary education, why was inclusion so important for me and the focus of my actions during the past year? Past Tech Club projects in which boys were the only participants had been successful, so why was it important that girls participate in Tech Club? Would students on the Autism Spectrum benefit from being included in Tech Club? How would the boys already in Tech Club grow by being part of a more inclusive learning community?
Last year a single fourth-grade girl participated in Tech Club but did not complete the project that she started. I knew that I wanted more girls to participate in Tech Club. I earned a minor in education in the 1990s, when remedying girls' exclusion in education was a primary focus of educational reform. Considering the lack of participation by girls in Tech Club, I wondered if schools failed to teach girls digital literacy. Was the way I attempted to teach digital literacy non-engaging for girls? Were the projects not the type in which a girl would be interested? Some of the best projects in past years involved girls' important contributions: one wrote the script for the first stop-motion film, another designed the sets. What made these girls want to participate in these particular projects? My Literature Review made me reconsider the way in which I taught digital literacy to girls. Successful transformation of Tech Club required listening to the voices of girls, letting them collaborate and be given choice in how their project was created and concluded. Transformation required changing most of the way Tech Club worked, from collaborating more on projects to encouraging students to form new working relationships
I was interested in including students on the Autism Spectrum in Tech Club because the elementary school started an Autism Spectrum program three years ago in response to the increasing number of students in the district who were on the Autism Spectrum. The program placed importance on the inclusion of the student in the classroom, with additional services available in the Spectrum classroom. The students' primary social interactions and opportunities were very insular. There were structured social situations, which are extremely important for Autistic students, but they existed within the Spectrum classroom. There were few opportunities for Autistic students to interact with typical students and for each to discover what the others are as people. One student from the program had already sought me out early in the school year after the previous male teacher who headed the Spectrum program moved to a different state. I realized the important growth this student had made in socializing and wanted to provide him additional opportunities to interact with his peers while giving him the support of an adult that he craved. I also saw technology as a means by which these students could better communicate and share their imaginations and emotions. Henry made stop-motion films in the past, and composed music in GarageBand last year. I saw the potential of Henry becoming a leader in Tech Club because of his existing digital literacy, and opportunities for Henry to help his peers build their digital literacy through collaborative work. I also saw the possibility of including other students from the Spectrum program in Tech Club. There they could interact socially with their peers in structured, supportive environments. Their communication differences might be mitigated by their use of technology to create digital projects. Digital literacy might level the playing field for these students.
While inclusion was important for me, I worried that changes to Tech Club's projects might affect boys' participation. Was I going to drive away the existing members in my efforts to recruit more girls and students on the Autism Spectrum? Or was I transforming Tech Club into a learning environment that would be beneficial to boys, too? Tech Club could change the way boys worked with other and technology. Instead of dominating, boys could learn to share and collaborate. Tech Club might offer boys a place where they could explore aesthetic choice. Importantly, Tech Club might offer boys chances to create collaborative working relationships. The benefits of an inclusive Tech Club would help boys to become more collaborative in their digital literacy.
I spent time pondering my role in Tech Club. Was I an instructor or a facilitator? In the past I acted as an instructor, directing the stop-motion film, leading students through worksheets that taught them how to use a computer application. Where was I for my efforts? No girls were participating. The projects the boys created were excellent, but did they feel they had ownership of the projects? If I ceded control of running Tech Club and let the students dictate the flow, content, and destination of a particular project, would the projects be more authentic? Were girls looking for authenticity and ownership in their technology projects? Would scaffolding the students allow them to make the choices they deemed important in creating their work but allow them support and guidance in order to develop and refine their digital literacy?
The role of technology in Tech Club was too central and affected girls' participation. Yet Autistic students who were interested in technology might be more inclined to participate knowing they would get to use computers and other technologies. My views on how technology should be taught changed as a result of my Action Research. Technology was not the focus of our projects, but it was used in every step of the process. Tech Club projects were focused on working independently and collaboratively to produce works of knowledge that demonstrated the students' digital literacy. Students captured their photos using digital cameras, edited and titled them using shared laptops, built web pages to display them on the internet also using laptops, and shared them at a public exhibition and on the schools intranet. Technology played a role in each step of the process, but the choices and the products the students created were the focus of everyone's efforts. The role of technology in Tech Club became more transparent this year.
I came into the Pepperdine Master's Program digitally literate. During the application process I expressed concern that I might not be challenged because I already knew how to build a web site, record a podcast, or make a digital film. I was assured that I would face many new challenges that promoted personal growth and would develop me as a leader. The program allowed me to build additional digital literacy and refine my skills. However, the most important personal transformation I underwent as a result of the program and my work was how I changed my views about why technology was important and how these views affected my actions.
I learned this year to understand that technology is an empowering way of providing students with different means of communicating. The work that students produced this year caught the disparate voices of all the students who participated, both literally through the podcasts they created to the figurative narrative that Larry captured using stop-motion film and Lego. Students like Paul were given leadership positions and scaffolded in order to work collaboratively and create a stunning work of student film. Students like Larry literally developed his voice through the songs he sang or stories he read and used technology to capture and perform. Girls could capture their imaginations through their creative use of film, they could transform themselves into queens or dragons. Technology gave these students myriad communication possibilities because they were allowed to make choices about how they wanted to capture their imaginations and because the technology and their digital literacy provided them differentiated and powerful means of communicating.
I conclude the Masters program with a different view of how I should facilitate students to build digital literacy and with a new reason for placing such importance on these skills. Students of tomorrow must have the digital literacy necessary to make their voices heard in the modern world. They must be equipped with the means to affect change in their lives and communities. Tech Club started these students on this path. The skills they built this year would be taken back to their classrooms and applied to different lessons. Their digital literacy would affect their actions in their lives and would allow them to be effective communicators in the modern world. My future work with students will value collaboration, technology as a means of communication, and inclusion. I feel my work has affected myself and others; this is the purpose of Action Research.