PROJECT PROFILES

Diversity is at the Core of the VKP at CSUMB

By Kelly Hamilton-Bracy

CSUMB opened its doors in 1995 with the mission of serving the diverse people of California, especially the working class and historically underserved and low-income populations. In its vision statement, the university commits to building a multicultural curriculum that will meet the needs of the state and the Tri-County region (Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito), serving inner-city and isolated rural populations in particular.

At the VKP Summer Institute last July, California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) Campus Coordinator Cecilia O'Leary recalled how she and her colleague Renee Curry recognized that their campus core group did not adequately represent California's diversity. As participants from a university committed to multicultural education, they felt their VKP campus group needed a broader spectrum of disciplinary knowledge and life experiences. O'Leary says, "we believe that you can't talk about creating new forms of knowledge if you do not ensure that a variety of voices are heard. Our VKP group needed to more fully represent a range of perspectives in terms of race, ethnicity, class, gender and region."

To achieve this broader representation, the initial group of four participants sought colleagues from other centers and institutes (i.e. colleges and departments) who were working on projects involved with new media and/or innovative pedagogy. The group also looked for interested junior faculty so that it could examine if and how the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning impacts efforts to gain tenure. O'Leary assembled background information on the VKP and sent it to faculty whom the group felt would make meaningful contributions.

VKP at CSUMB now has nine members and representatives from across the university. The group includes Rina Benmayor (Oral History, Literature and Latina/o Studies), Curry (English), Gilbert Neri (Visual and Public Art) and O'Leary (Cultural History) from the Center for Arts, Human Communication, & Creative Technologies; Deborah Ramirez Lango (International and Multicultural Education) and Christine Sleeter (Education) from the Center for Collaborative Education & Professional Studies; Renee Perry (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) from the Center for Science, Technology, & Information Resources; Juan Gutierrez (Anthropology) and Adrian Hull (Political Science) from the Center for Social and Behavioral Sciences.

To facilitate participants' active involvement, the group is working with its new members to prepare proposals using the working groups process from the VKP Summer Institute. New members will be presenting their proposals during the Spring 2002 semester. Rather than starting their research year "cold," explains O'Leary, future Primary Researchers will be better prepared by these initial discussions of their projects. Research projects include exploring how different instructional technologies enhance (and obstruct) the achievement of course outcomes, whether software in mathematics and statistic courses which make calculations simpler are leading to deeper understandings, and if autobiographical writing and digital authoring can demystify theory and theorizing by making these processes more visible to students.

The CSUMB core group will also be completing a VKP Web page in this Spring that will feature threaded discussions of topics covered at their monthly meetings, as well as fundraising for the additional funds needed to support the group's work in years three to five of the project.

http://hcom.csumb.edu/academic/
2tier/major/breadth/index.html

O'Leary feels the CSUMB group will also help VKP take part in the national discussion on outcomes based education. CSUMB, she notes, has particular facility with talking in outcomes language, rejecting a definition rigidly based on end product and instead recognizing the interconnected process of learning. All CSUMB classes have a set of outcomes, listed in the syllabus which students must demonstrate competency in to satisfactorily fulfill the requirements of the class. The work of VKP, literally making learning and knowledge construction visible at every single stage of the process, dovetails with this view of outcomes based learning. "Our group is going to be able to make significant contributions to national and university-wide discussions about outcomes and assessment ," says O'Leary.

Renee Curry

"Looking at whether students are learning, and how they're learning and how we know they're learning" is crucial to what it means to be a professor, says CSUMB Primary Researcher Renee Curry. A professor of English for 12 years, with 25 years' experience in education, Curry's interdisciplinary interest and subsequent interdisciplinary scholarship has been in literature studies and film studies. She currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Human Communications, CSUMB's Humanities department. "Those of us who really love what we do" says Curry, "are constantly looking for new ways to study [our] own pedagogy."

The CSUMB working group has been instrumental in helping Curry define her research project. It is exceptional, remarks Curry, "for any [group of] scholars, on any campus, as teachers to be able to get together to talk about teaching. People on the outside think it happens all the time but it really doesn't." Her course, Race, Colonialism, and Film, provides an opportunity to analyze and discuss the ways that film has portrayed issues of colonialism, race, culture, equity, power relationships, and identity over the past one hundred years.

For her VKP research, Curry set out to examine how to make visible to students the prep work and knowledge she herself brings to each class. Her research question asks if students understand a film better if they go to the websites and resources she herself draws on in her scholarship. Specifically, Curry is asking, "Do they learn more or better or more substantially if I lecture to them or if they do it [the background research] themselves?"

Curry has created "Visible Knowledge Portfolios" for her students to reference and contribute to when preparing to view a film. For the films shown early in the semester, the portfolios list six websites (two about the film, two about the geographical area and its history, two on the film's director or some other important, relevant political issue). Curry reports that with these changes she and the students spend the first hour of class engaged in conversation about the films and the credibility of the websites. Students now come to class, says Curry, "with some information already under their belts."

http://www.shekharkapur.com/interview1.htm

Curry 's "Visible Knowledge Portfolios" include Web resources
on a film's subject matter, geographical location and director.

Curry provides fewer and fewer resources in the portfolios as the course progresses so the tasks of evaluating pertinent websites and identifying those that are credible fall to the students. By the final film of the class, students find all six sources on their own, even more. "The evidence is they don't stop at six because they are so interested," says Curry. Additionally, students' critical skills are challenged by this experience of wading through so many questionable sites, and their written reflections reflect how their research using new media resources helped in their understanding of the film.

Curry's efforts to define her project led her to recognize significant concerns that arise from this kind of work. "I couldn't think about giving up my piece of expertise," she says. "I still had this idea that I want them to think I'm knowledgeable. By making that knowledge visible was I giving up something?" Furthermore, it's a different world of research than the time when students were turning to publications of peer-reviewed material. When students are beginning to learn evaluative and analytical skills, says Curry, she struggles with a tendency to protect them "from getting stuck in the mire. You almost just want to hand them the sources.... But that doesn't teach them." Curry describes this experience as "wading through all of that pedagogical heritage of what it means to be a professor…. I kept thinking making knowledge visible had something to do with the content of the course and, ultimately it does, but it had something to do with making the process of acquiring knowledge visible to our students so it's not such a huge mystery and so they can do it themselves. I took it out of the ivory tower."

Christine Sleeter

Encouraging this sort of self-examination by teachers is a prominent component of Christine Sleeter's teaching in Multicultural Education. The CSUMB Primary Researcher is the Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Education. For her research project, Sleeter is focusing on her Multicultural Curriculum Design course in the Masters of Arts in Education program.One aim of this course has been to help teachers recognize their own assumptions, lack of knowledge or ideologies about what they think is worth teaching when developing multicultural curricula: "It's been real hard for me to try to figure out how to push people beyond the bounds of what they already know and to try to push them in ways that …[are] expanding their conception of what they even could be teaching," says Sleeter.

http://classes.csumb.edu/MAE/
MAE637-01/world/index.html

Sleeter's research project focuses on her Multicultural Curriculum Design course in the Masters of Arts in Education program.

To tackle this problem, Sleeter says she was helped by the VKP suggested readings on teaching around "big ideas." She assigns a Curriculum Concept paper where students select a concept or skill (i.e. big idea) around which to develop multicultural curriculum. After identifying a historically marginalized group whose experience relates to that big idea, students compare the presentation of the idea in traditional curriculum texts with the perspective of intellectuals from the historically marginalized group. Students then describe ways to reframe the concept based on their research. Sleeter reports that this assignment has challenged students' thinking more than in any of her previous classes in which she attempted to have teachers construct multicultural curriculum.

Sleeter also wants to improve her students' ability to do more critical thinking about curriculum resources. Students work in pairs to review Web-based and traditionally published materials to identify the perspective of the author(s), and what curriculum concepts are and are not represented, and what ideology informs the materials. Sleeter aims to expand the horizons of where students would look for information on a particular issue.

The research questions Sleeter is focusing on in her Multicultural Curriculum Design course center around the concept of ideology. She is examining "what it means to identify the perspective from which any body of knowledge comes and what it means to think of teaching in a way that incorporates multiple perspectives." Sleeter says being involved in VKP and going through the process of refining these questions has "been helpful to me… because it's really forced me to think about what are students learning in relationship to the main thing I am trying to get them to learn."

November 2002

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