CAREER: Making Culture Visible: Using Technology to Foster Culturally Responsive Instruction

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Contemporary views of learning (Cole, 1996; Gardner, 1991; Perkins, 1992; Saxe, 1991; Wertsch, 1991) have emphasized the importance of attending to the interactions among learners their contexts, and tools they use to mediate their interactions. However, in the transformation of these views of learning into classroom instructional materials and practices under the banner of constructivism little attention has focused on the dimensions of culture and context that are influenced by the experiences of ethnicity, language variation, or race (Lee, 1994). Attention to these cultural dimensions are of central importance, particularly to learning in school contexts, considering the increasing diversity of students in U.S. schools and the continued performance gap between minority and majority. The research focuses on understanding the complex interrelationship among culture, technology, instruction, design and student engagement and cognitive gain. This CAREER proposal seeks to provide an avenue for this exploration in the context of designers', teachers', and students' use of the Lyric Reading Authoring Tool (described below) and its products. Lyric Reader is a tool that enables designers to build culturally responsive beginning literacy learning environments that use oral text (i.e. song lyrics, playground chants) drawn from children's cultural capital as sources of reading material. Specifically, this research will focus on the development of a conceptual framework of the complex interrelationship among culture, technology, instruction, design and student engagement and cognitive gain by exploring the following questions: What are the cognitive and motivational benefits of using culturally responsive learning environments with emergent readers from diverse ethnic and language backgrounds? How can Lyric Reader, a software-authoring tool, scaffold designers in the construction of culturally responsive computer-based learning environments? In what ways can accessibility to on-going assessment data about students performance in culturally responsive learning environments influence teachers' design of classroom learning supports and their perceptions and expectations of low achieving, low income? Through the exploration of these three questions, this research hopes to contribute to an understanding of how technology can support designers and teachers in drawing on the cultural capital of all students.