Perspective from another - David Wong

When I first met Denise Bacchus, she was interested in exploring not only different teaching strategies but using more contemporary forms of technology to engage students in critical thinking and writing.  Her interests in these areas had started much earlier when she was a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley and a teacher in the Oakland public school system.  Along with strategies such as role playing where students dramatized characters from the books they were reading in class, Denise constructed a course weblog, i.e., blog, as a means for students to share their narratives of women who had been a powerful influence in their lives.  The narrative activity gave students a chance to share their pictures and narratives publicly with other classmates and the women upon whom the stories were based.  This combination of classroom activity and technology helped students bridge the divide between the historical fiction they were reading and the narratives they were writing from their own worlds. 

As a parallel to the blog, Denise developed a website - http://instructors.sbcc.edu/bacchus/sohp/diaspora/  that chronicled her experiences and described the theories upon which her strategies and educational philosophies were based.  She invited teachers from SBCC and other educational institutions to review her efforts, wrote about her work in educational journals, and presented her findings at international conferences where she believed there might be other researchers and practitioners interested in similar pursuits.

Over time, Denise has developed a number of other blogs to support her historical fiction writing and alternative forms of story presentation, and more recently has began to experiment with taping and editing videos in conjunction with weblogs as digital, hybrid form of storytelling.  These more recent efforts were, in part, to develop expertise and skill with the technology and storytelling prior to asking her students to produce narratives in these more contemporary forms.  From my brief discussions with her over the past semester, it appears that her experiments have had an effect on her perspectives about writing forms and the future of teaching reading and composition.  

I have no doubt that she will share these with you.

I believe her challenges will be many as she moves forward:  a)colleagues who do not believe that her efforts will produce students with equivalent reading and writing skills from those obtained with more traditional methods;  b) Students who are comfortable consumers but not producers of technology projects; and, c) A lack of training and support for students on campus who need help producing dynamic media-based projects.

David L. Wong, Ph.D.
Director, Instructional Technology
Co-Director, Faculty Resource Center
Santa Barbara City College
721 Cliff Drive, Santa Barbara, CA  93109