Category: Curriculum Studies

The projects that we have created over the past weeks covered inclusiveness and digital literacy. The intention was to create a cache of resources to build digital literacy in teachers and have resources available to distribute to parents if needed.

 Added to the aspect of building digital literacy in teachers is the inclusion inherent in teaching to all students. The resources suggested address some issues teachers face in attempting to address accessibility, but also inclusion and by association, participation and engagement.

 Outcome # 1: Teachers will be able to use and navigate a variety of websites and platforms to facilitate learning and be able to share resources with parents and students.

 Outcome #2: Support oral language practice synchronously while remote learning to address varying levels of Technology access, internet bandwidth, and time zones.

OUTCOME #1

 Concerning outcome #1, the resources are multiple posts providing how-to videos and documents to assist teachers to find specific solutions for Google Classroom and FreshGrade. It also provides opportunities for professional development to allow teachers to use the tools more effectively during remote learning. These resources will ensure easier navigation for educators to use Google Classroom and FreshGrade in their classroom as well as providing a collection of resources to distribute to parents and students in order to facilitate their learning and grow their digital literacy. These two platforms are heavily used in the Greater Victoria School District and it seemed practical to use something that many teachers deal with on a daily basis in school.

 As defined by the British Columbia Digital Framework, “Digital Literacy is the interest, attitude and ability of individuals to use digital technology and communication tools appropriately to access, manage, integrate, analyze and evaluate information, construct new knowledge, and create and communicate with others.” (Education, n.d.). 

 As the B.C. digital framework is an important facet of the curriculum it is essential that educators embrace and work towards integrating the values of the framework into their teaching practice. Nevertheless, in my own personal experience, there is very little professional development that the districts put forward to train teachers to effectively use platforms such as Google Classroom and FreshGrade. This became abundantly clear during the Covid-19 shutdown. If B.C.’s digital framework is part of the curriculum then it is important to treat it like a traditional subject. Teachers should take it slow and teach the entirety of basic computer literacy, which would hopefully allow students to build transferable skills that can be used throughout their academic career and continue to build the teachers’ digital literacy at the same time. Just as if you are teaching mathematics, first you have to teach students number sense and continue to scaffold new concepts on top of existing knowledge to progress. In order for this same approach to become commonplace when teaching digital literacy there needs to be significant improvement in supporting teachers to achieve best practices in this area. 

 There are a plethora of articles outlining the benefits of teachers receiving more training in digital literacy. However, there is little empirical data of professional development and pre-service training in digital literacy (Redmond, 2018).  Although Redmond’s context is from an American lens, I propose that a similar problem exists in Canada. 

 From my personal experience, professional development for digital literacy is treated as a one-off workshop instead of being integrated into the mainstream teaching practices. This is because many teachers are uncomfortable with using the digital infrastructure in the first place. The literature supports that digital literacy education for teachers would be highly beneficial to students, but there is limited evidence of proper infrastructure to support Canadian teachers to grow their own digital literacy (McLean & Rowsell, 2019). In addition, with the demand for students to use more digital tools in school,  parents expect teachers and schools to be digitally literate authority figures and be able to provide information and advice on digital tools and applications (Ciboci & Labaš, 2019).

 Covid-19 exposed the shortcomings of the abilities of many teachers to effectively facilitate learning through an online platform. It put a spotlight on the deficit of professional development in digital literacy and the need for more accessible resources available for teachers to utilize.  

 OUTCOME #2

EVIDENCE

Achieving the goal of supporting oral language practice synchronously while remote learning requires educators to examine both accessibility and inclusion. That is, students engaged in a language class would have a learning outcome that includes listening, speaking and interacting. (Japanese | Building Student Success – BC’s New Curriculum, n.d.) From a pragmatic point of view, measuring the three aspects of listening, speaking, and interacting would be simple to track from an educator’s position. In a synchronous setting, an educator may set up activities such as information exchange, or dictation, or model dialogues and track student involvement.

The complicating factors involved in synchronous remote teaching are aspects such as students having appropriate technology hardware to interact, as well as reliable internet signal at home, and being in a time zone that facilitates synchronous meeting. An educator may have control over the time and number of times a synchronous meeting may occur, but cannot control for a student’s access to technology or reliable internet access. Adjustments may be made at the school or district level to eliminate the need for technology hardware, but reliable internet access may be a hurdle that cannot be addressed by the educator or the school.

Once those factors are addressed, it is the educator who must measure success of achieving the goal by student participation and engagement. To measure increased participation and engagement, educators may measure achievement of their goal by looking at number of times students verbally contributed, or added to the chat screen.

SUMMARY

The resource activity seeks to give educators suggestions on ways to increase participation and engagement in the synchronous remote teaching meetings. The first three activities are applicable to both the remote teaching scenario, as well as the classroom setting. The second two activities are focused solely on the synchronous online meeting scenario.

The first three activities are: Beginning the meeting with casual chatting; Using Breakout Rooms; and having both instructor and students using Screen Share. Of the two suggestions specific to synchronous online meetings, the use of Virtual Backgrounds and Using Filter apps may aid in increasing participation.

 CURRICULAR DISCOURSE, DEVELOPMENT, DOCUMENT IMPACT OF DESIGN

As David Blades discusses curriculum and its “enframing,” (Blades, 1995) we look backward at the Japanese curriculum guide to check whom it serves. Does it serve students or the creators of it? We assume that the committee of people assembled to produce the curriculum document did so to address the best research available in curriculum studies. Once that document lands in the hands of teachers and by proxy, students, what direction does it take? Ted Aoki would take the curriculum document as only part of the equation. The resource suggestions I put forth are rooted in Aoki’s term of “curriculum-as-plan” (Aoki 1986), but are also limited by my research searches. I have drawn from generally Eurocentric articles and studies. Indeed, my own experiential suggestions of virtual background and filter use is from within a Canadian and more specifically, Victoria setting. The students I address attend Victoria High School, and I expect that these students, at this time, would respond to the suggestions in a predictable way. Indeed, as Aoki describes the “indwelling” (Aoki, 1986) where the teacher resides between the curriculum-as-plan, and the curriculum-as-lived, I can only speak to my own biases in using these suggestions. The success or failure of the suggestions may not lie in the suggestions themselves – although they might – but what most teachers intrinsically know, is that sometimes it is the particular group of students in that class, at that time. Yet it may also be the particular teacher and the background that inhabits that teacher.

OUTCOME #1 REFERENCES 

Ciboci, L., & Labaš, D. (2019). Digital Media Literacy, School and Contemporary Parenting. Medijske Studije, 10(19), 83–101. https://doi.org/10.20901/ms.10.19.5

McLean, C., & Rowsell, J. (2019). Digital Literacies in Canada. In J. Lacina & R. Griffith (Eds.), Preparing Globally Minded Literacy Teachers (1st ed., pp. 177–198). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429397790-11

Redmond, T. (2018). Learning to Teach the Media: Pre-Service Teachers Articulate the Value of Media Literacy Education. In Pre-Service and In-Service Teacher Education: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications (Vol. 1–Book, Section, pp. 1275–1297). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-7305-0.ch059

OUTCOME #2 REFERENCES

Aoki, Ted T. (1986). Teaching as indwelling between two curriculum worlds.In The B.C. Teacher, April/May (Vancouver: British Columbia Teachers’Association)

Blades, D. (1995) Procedures of Power in a Curriculum Discourse Conversations from Home. JCT, 11(4), 125-155.

Japanese | Building Student Success—BC’s New Curriculum. (n.d.). Retrieved July 27, 2020, from https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum/second-languages/japanese/introduction