Technology as a tool in multiculural teaching

Multicultural Education, Winter 2002 by Sleeter, Christine, Tettegah, Sharon

Since the early 1990s, hypermedia CDROMs have been appearing for multicultural teaching at the K-12 as well as the university levels. TheAmerican Social History project developed two early CD-ROMs entitled Who Built America, which offer a multicultural perspective on U.S. history. The first was more like a print book on a CD-ROM than it was like a multimedia book, but it opened the door to experimentation with electronic multimedia texts. Since then, a growing number of multicultural hypermedia CD-ROMs has been produced.

Sleeter (2001) developed and has used Culture, Difference and Power in multicultural teacher education. It integrates more than a book's worth of text, along with video vignettes of seven classroom teachers and one school, video interviews with two artists and five noted theorists, hundreds of pictures and other graphics, and a variety of interactive features that enable the student to move about within the CDROM and engage with it. Students have an opportunity to "meet" people through video, and see teachers actually doing multicul-tural teaching in their own classrooms. Students report that the hyperlinking helps them to connect ideas, the graphics help them understand concepts, and the interactivity makes reading the text engaging.

Homebeats (Institute of Race Relations, 1999) is an interactive multimedia CD-ROM designed to teach British youth about the struggles people of African descent have waged against racism. It blends music, pictures, text, and video, engaging students in a game while they learn. The Multicultural Experience (1996) is a set of CD-ROMs containing a wealth of primary materials, including audiotapes of music and speeches, that students in grades 7 and up can use for doing research into U.S. history. The bilingual English-Spanish CDROM Chicano! (NLCC, 1997) provides students with a wealth of historical information about the Chicano civil rights struggle; it includes video clips, audio clips, photos, maps, articles, biographical sketches, and primary source documents.

The hyperlinking feature of new media facilitates exploring multiple perspectives. For example, a problem in teaching multi-cultural history is how to examine diverse experiences and points of view meaningfully, without collapsing multiple histories into one grand narrative (Cornbleth, 1998). Through multimedia CD-ROMs, WWW, and the Internet, students can explore multiple historical narratives. Using hypermedia authoring tools such as Hyperstudio, students can create multilayered narratives in which they explore for themselves how historical experiences connect. Hypermedia lends itself to shifting from "neat" to "messy" history.by encouraging students to examine multiple historical narratives, connecting them where they overlap without subsuming diverse narratives to one grand narrative (Brunner & Tally, 1999, p. 41-43).

Multimedia CD-ROMs are also beginning to offer simulations for multicultural teaching. Students learning Spanish can now solve a mystery using Nuevos Destinos, which was produced by collaboration between the Annenberg Institute and McGraw Hill. In this CD-ROM, mysteries are introduced in a telenovela style, using video. Students can click on various objects on the screen for materials that will help them solve the mystery. All of it is done in Spanish, so students have to read and produce Spanish to solve the mysteries.