| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Interview with San Francisco Teachers: Connecting Students to the World; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 2 of 2
Nanou Matteson: The heart of our Connecting Students to the World project, as everybody here knows, is interviews, which Harry has conducted right here in this studio, with distinguished visitors to the University and now faculty members of the University. We use these interviews and work with teachers to incorporate some of the ideas explained in the interviews into some of the work that the teachers are doing in their curriculum.
Harry Kreisler: It's about individuals telling their story and relating them to ideas across different fields. Then we place the material up on the Web. Now, we'd like to ask how both of you have used the materials? First you, Gale. What course were you teaching where you found this material useful?
Gale Ow: I used it in a very specialized situation.
I teach an Asian-American history class. I searched through the Globetrotter websites and I looked for different people who have worked in Asia or are from Asia and got their sense of what is important to them in life. Part of my course is to have these students help to define what it is to be Asian. So, using the website gave lots of possibilities to broaden this definition. It was a very organic work in progress, and it generated a lot of discussion because of the diversity of the people that we found on the sites -- for the students themselves to say, "I didn't know someone Indian spoke English this well!" -- it really broadened their world.
Kreisler: Let's tell the audience who were some of the people, some of the interviews that you looked at. I know Shashi Tharoor was one ...
Ow: Yes, yes.
Kreisler: ... who is an Indian diplomat and writer. Who else?
Ow: The Thai woman who is ...
Kreisler: Kritaya Archavanitkul. And Anson Chan as well?
Ow: Anson Chan and Wei Jingsheng and ...
DaRosa: Chris Patten?
Ow: Yes, Chris Patten, right, right. Also, I'm thinking of Sadako ...
Kreisler: Ogata. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Ow: Yes, yes. It was very important that we work with her, because she had been in the news lately. And the students made the connection of, "Gee, we've read about this woman" and she came up and it was like, "Wow! It's not just this person on the 'Net. It's a real, live person."
Kreisler: She got a degree here at Berkeley and she was in the thick of things. An Asian woman, the key player in saving refugees in places like Kosovo and so on. Thais, which of the interviews did you use? And what were your comments about using the materials?
Matteson: And what course were you teaching?
DaRosa: In the Modern World History course we primary used Wei Jingsheng's interview as a Chinese political dissident who spent fifteen years in prison. He clearly had some very strong beliefs. So our project was to define the values by which we live. I had my students go through various interviews through the site to establish the values that led people, for the example of Wei Jingsheng, to political dissent and his choice for his behavior. So background notes were very important. And we looked at what came before. The artistic expression, the political activism.
Kreisler: We should explain to our audience that in each of these interviews the guest tell their personal story. And so on the site, students and teachers can find what books they read as children, how their parents influenced them, and so on. Have you had any reactions from your students about that kind of material, that is, "Gee, that's neat that Wei Jingsheng read Mark Twain when he was growing up," for example?
DaRosa: My students, being predominantly Asian themselves, said, "Oh, yes, our values, our home values are very similar to Wei Jingsheng's," who was taught early on that how to conduct himself was very important. Ethical conduct. So when our students came to do their own interviews with an elder of their family, they found very great similarities between Wei Jingsheng and their own personal experiences and the values that were passed on to him from his parents and from their own.
Kreisler: So you're suggesting in a way that in using the site, not only are the students getting useful information about these well-known people from all over the world and how they became who they are, but also they're beginning to think about what is involved in doing interviews themselves, which you assigned.
DaRosa: We moved on and we had them do their own interviews. So we had to ask them to pose their questions. I gave them a few sample questions: What are your values? How are they arrived at? Or what led you to your own reason for living?
Kreisler: These were questions that they would ask relatives or families?
DaRosa: I designed the assignment so that it might be asked of a person over 30. (A couple of students asked an older sibling or cousin who maybe hadn't had quite enough life experience to really give a good background to their answers.) These were very revelatory, because many of the students, unconsciously -- we all unconsciously operate from certain base of values and ethics, but we don't know what they are. If you ask me right away, "What are your values?" you know, I'd have to really think for awhile and construct them. So it was very useful for my students to understand the traditional, the religious, the humanistic values that they unconsciously live by. And it was very, very interesting as a teacher to read through these student interviews and see, okay, the interviews that just said that money was very important to acquire -- the parent came from rural China and had very little opportunity as a youth, and was deprived of a great deal. And so money was very important. And that's a primary value that has been transferred to this generation here in the United States. One becomes very much more empathetic when one understands the background.
Kreisler: Gale, you mentioned Sadako Ogata and the reaction to the students who were able to go online and read about her background at the same time that her name was in the newspapers. Tell us a little about their reaction to that.
Ow: Well, they kept saying, "Wow! I mean, this lady's still around." And, "She's visiting Cuba." And she really was [as reported in the newspaper]. It was like a verification of the fact that this person is an active member of society and is continuing this kind of work. It was very good experience for them, because it gave them a sense that there are people out there that are doing things important that don't fit certain kinds of set expectations. And also the understanding, too, in reading about her life, that she has a sense of dedication to service and humanity. It was a very, very important connection for them to make. It was very interesting because for final exam, my students had to memorize a poem or write a poem. One of my students found a poem that Russell Leong wrote of Wei Jingsheng. The student actually learned it and memorized it, and it was an extension of going to Wei's interview on the Globetrotter website, reading his advice and the understanding that each one of the people we read had made a decision to choose their own path. And these young people, at this point in their life, need to hear this, because they get so much pressure, you know, "Go to the Big School." To hear that these kinds of people come from this school that they aspire to go to, have some contact with it, and can form their own realities, that they don't have to follow that which is expected. It was very, very important for them. They expressed a lot of understanding, and it was a movement in that kind of development.
Kreisler: You've talked a little about your education at Berkeley and the broadening of experience that represented for you, and how, before the technology came along, you were trying to apply what you'd learned and what you're learning in the classroom. And then suddenly, in this very complex environment this technology is thrust on you, on all of us, not just in the classroom, and this material, that is, the Conversations with History and the Connecting Students to the World, other resources, helped you navigate this complexity. That is, what you want to teach with technology, but on topics that really matter to you. Is that a fair summary statement?
Ow: Yes. It was really wonderful for me to know that there is a whole sector of people who just quietly go ahead and just make a difference. They don't have to be in the front pages every day. They "keep on trucking." They work hard. They're dedicated. And it confirms the idea that you don't have to be this big basketball player. You don't have to publish this great book. People quietly find their vision and pursue it.
DaRosa: When my students discovered this week that Wei Jingsheng's photo was in the newspaper and his comments were of importance with regard to the voting on China's trade status, they immediately said, "Oh, this Wei Jingsheng! We know this person." And they could connect that he is continuing to express his activism. He is continuing to express his values, his entire upbringing, on an ongoing basis. In a Modern World History class, that [process] is clearly involving the student to see that these contemporary, current issues are ongoing and [the student] can be part of it in discovering the continuity from the past to the present and the future.
Matteson: What sort of preparation did you do with your students prior to having them work with the site? Gale?
Ow: We talked about the fact that we were going to work with UC Berkeley. Immediately they were so impressed. And then, that they were working in groups of two was to them a nice change. They felt that there wasn't as much pressure. Then I talked about my involvement with the IU in Connecting Students to the World. And then we went to the lab and we actually navigated. I gave them time to just navigate throughout the Web and to read different interviews. And then we proceeded on with the lesson. It took about a week, but it was important that they had a chance to find it, to navigate around it, to get the sense that, "Wow! There are all these people are doing interesting things." And to find their own interests and to develop some kind of rapport with their partner before we actually started going through specific parts of the websites looking for specific people.
Kreisler: So it's integrating the topic with the technology with various kinds of human interaction. In your case, pairs of students working together on a particular topic. Thais, your experience?
DaRosa: My students worked individually, accessing current contemporary events of the area in which we were studying. We generally work six to eight weeks on a particular area or region of the world. They were already connected to the Web in their search for relevant news, contemporary news. Then we tried a couple of sample interviews from Conversations with History. I gave them some practice locating the site, bookmarking it, and looking at the focus topic, which was the values or the motivations that led the person to the action which they were primarily being interviewed about. And then subsequently after the interview focus, which was Wei Jingsheng's interview, I had the students create their own interview with their relative or other person who had been meaningful to their lives.
Kreisler: So they're learning two things in a way: the skills of interviewing by reading interviews about people, but also drawing out content from those interview.
DaRosa: And learning the technology.
Kreisler: I'm curious. One of the issues educators are often talking about is achievement -- "measures of achievement" -- how do we know if a program like this works. Do you have any thoughts on that, either of you, about how you know what you've accomplished?
DaRosa: I know what I've accomplished by their own opinion, comment, or analysis of it, which I require, even if they're reviewing a contemporary current event: What is your comment about it? How do you connect it to other things that are going on? What do you think the outcomes might be? What suggestion might you have for the resolution of this issue? And so I understand the students are thinking about these issues as they comment about them and reflect about them, which I think is a very important component for any assignment -- to have the students evaluate it, connect it to their own lives.
Ow: In my situation, it was the discussion that followed after we searched the websites and followed with the study questions. There was the discussion of what the students were interested in. So I tried to follow with what the students were interested in. Things like, "Wow, you mean, this person read that many books?" And you could see the interest. Or, "Wow! You mean the Chief Adminsitrator of Hong Kong is a woman?" And "Who is this Chris Patten?* I mean, is he white?" So that you see a sense of interest and their interpretation of what they see that's important in the website. Subsequently, we had a big discussion of defining who an Asian is, as they are Asian-American and many come from immigrant backgrounds, and they have a very vague sense, and a very strict sense of what it is to be Asian. And so we had quite a sturdy discussion and then a follow-up where they created a pie chart, using percentages, as to how much should be language, culture, tradition, whatever, that would create an Asian. So there was a lot of discussion, a lot of journal-writing afterwards on this activity. It became something that brought us also to study more about Asia. Well, what is happening in Thailand? What is happening in India today? And it generated that interest, so we went towards that curriculum later on in the semester.
Kreisler: So this online material is a resource that captures diversity of topics, but also the diversity that is the world and has broadened kids' horizons to something beyond their local community or their own country to other countries in the world.
Ow: Yes, yes.
Kreisler: Looking back now and reflecting on the experience that we've had this past year working with the schools, our side, the University, learning your needs and you learning the resources that we have to offer, what lessons have you learned? Any reflections about what makes this process, the University - school relationship, really work?
Ow: I think it was beneficial that we were all from the same district.
Kreisler: The teachers all from San Francisco?
Ow: Yes, yes. Because there was a common experience, implicit understanding. And, of course, working here at the University, as Thais says, is a breath of fresh air. We get so set in our cubbyholes. Also the fact that this was a pilot, it was a good start. Things are evolving and it's getting more clearly defined. I think that's helping. And I think I've never had as much contact with the technology aspect of the San Francisco schools as I had this year. And, of course, it's great to come back here and work.
Kreisler: And Thais, yourself?
DaRosa: I think the opportunity to become more fearless about online technology as provided by this project. I had used it before in History of Art classes, just going to a website that had images that I needed. I brought the students into the computer room and used LCD, liquid crystal display units, to project images, but this was much more living. These were people. These were people that were active in various different fields.
Kreisler: You're talking about the Conversations interviews?
DaRosa: The Conversation interviews, around the world and in the modern world. So for my Modern World History class, it really connected the students to the modern world, whereas the textbook could not. The people in the textbook are, by and large, gone and dead. These were living people that were making history.
Kreisler: I guess, listening to you and your experiences, down the road, now and in the future, technology will have to be integrated into the classroom. But books will still remain, right? Or hardcopy materials in addition to the technology.
DaRosa: I think they will be less and less used. We're at the moment of adopting new Modern World History texts, none of which I feel are really quality publications. They're made for a very wide audience, the entire national market. And so they have to appeal to the designs of many different states, and we are teaching a very specific Social Studies framework in California. So they're not necessarily prepared for our courses. And they oftentimes are very uninspiring, very stripped down, very outlined, very uncontroversial. They don't have passion in them. And so you have to use them as an outline, at best. The Web offers opportunity for resources that are living, that are even interactive, or have the potential for being so. I find myself using the textbook over the last years less and less and less. I say, "Take it home. Keep it safe at home. Leave it in your locker. You might lose it. And we'll refer to it a few times during the semester." And that's what we have done. And lately we've referred to it less and less.
Ow: I think that books are important. It depends on the subject, too. I think students do need to be able to go back and refer to certain things. But, for example, on some of your websites there is an audio part. And just hearing the language, making that connection -- it's very organic. It's very alive. But you can't substitute a textbook. I think websites are really important -- the Internet -- because the very up-to-date stuff is on it. And also the fact that students need to learn how to navigate and work their way through just as much as it takes to work through a library. And that's an important skill. So I think you do need both.
Kreisler: One final question to you both. What would your advice be to teachers out there about using The Connecting Students to the World project?
Ow: I would say, "Try it." Try it.
DaRosa: Try it, yeah.
Kreisler: Thank you very much for joining us today, Gale and Thais. And thank you, Nanou. And thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with San Francisco teachers.
Note: Chris Patten was the last Governor-General of Hong Kong.
Back to the body of the interview.
© Copyright 2000, Regents of the University of California