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♪ [music playing throughout] ♪♪
I'm Dr. John Beckford in the Elementary, Middle Level
Education Department in the College of Education at Eastern.
I specialize in social studies education, I teach elementary
and middle level education classes on social studies theory
and social studies methodologies both at the undergraduate
and graduate level.
Sometimes I teach classes on adolescent social and emotional
behavioral development.
I'm a qualitative researcher, I focus mostly on social studies
methodology and authentic assessments and a couple years
ago I noticed that when political cartoons were used
very frequently in social studies methods classes,
I'm sorry, in social studies classrooms a lot of social
studies researchers were encouraging teachers in the
field to use political cartoons for students to interpret.
And I noticed that this was all interpretation and there was
a lot of discrepancy between what encoded messages were
inside the political cartoons like did the cartoonist intend
to encode this message.
And a lot of time there would be disagreements with teachers
and students, this happened both in my own class when I was
teaching 7th grade and also when I was, since I've been at
Eastern and I've noticed that one of the problems with this,
you never know what the artist intended because
they don't say it.
They don't really share what they intended to encode,
but people can interpret it and a lot of times people
can get confused.
Another thing, when it comes to these interpretations
is the middle tier thinking level.
It's a middle tier thinking skill, it's not even close to
one of the top three as defined by Bloom's Taxonomy or Anderson
and [unclear dialogue] revision of Bloom's Taxonomy.
The highest levels are evaluation and creation,
so one of the things I started having students do when I was
teaching 7th grade is create their own original political
cartoons where they would take primary historical evidence
and secondary historical interpretations and they'd
compare and contrast with say historical fiction novels
and they'd create their own political cartoon and they'd
share it with the class.
It started out as simple, with something as simple as drawing
it and then they presented in the class and a lot of times
with the drawing you'd have really good artists spend way
too much time on it, or they'd be very self conscious about
their work or a lot of times very poor artists wouldn't want
to be judge because they have stick figures and things and
these are 7th grade kids.
So around 2006 or 2007 my students started using
PowerPoint and Microsoft Paint to digitally alter internet
images and add text and modify things to create one slide
PowerPoint displays of a political cartoon.
And this is the highest level of Bloom's Taxonomy their
creatively expressing a newly constructed understanding based
on evaluation of all sorts of evidence and primary sources.
And I've started analyzing those and examining them.
I've had four or five different articles published on this
on student's original political cartoons, and I really enjoy it
because the unique thing here when it comes to say, the artist
problems when they were drawing it, the best artists sometimes
take the longest and finding images is quick.
And sometimes the worst artists are very self conscious about it
say drawing faces or drawing the white house, you can draw
a house but how can you distinguish that as the white
house, there's a lot of details that are very hard and it's so
easy and it's effective and efficient technologies.
Microsoft Paint and the internet and PowerPoint technologies make
it really effective and efficient and kids feel very
very comfortable and confident when their work.
The unique thing about this is it started really as a learning
assessment an authentic learning assessment at that,
a "show me what you learned" activity as opposed
to a summative reformative assessment.
And the kids were very creative and they were very unique
in their presentations.
The unique thing about it that I've stumbled across after I've
started examining these authentic assessment learning
activities, that one kids authentic assessment,
one kids political cartoon he presents it to the classroom
and she shares it with her friends and it becomes
a teaching tool for everybody else.
And as some of the political cartoons that I've submitted can
show you that where one person is expressing what they know in
one political cartoon, when that one political cartoon is shared
with the class it's a teaching tool for everybody else.
Every body else in the room is trying to interpret what this
person encoded, what messages were encoded and unlike with
professional political cartoons, the artist is in the room and
the artist can share what she originally intended to encode,
what textual messages, why is she organized the textual
messages and visual symbolism the way that she did.
And students can be very very complex in their thinking,
they can be very demonstrative in sharing what they understood,
using visual symbolism and encoded messages
and contextual statements.
The unique part about it is how this learning assessment becomes
a teaching tool for other students.
In a way it's kind of like passing understandings forward.
Where one kid learns it and shares it and then other kids
learn from what that kid shared.
In a way it's kind of like a science experiment where
everybody does their own science projects and then there's
presentations at the end and then everybody walks around
looking at everybody else's learning assessment.
If this science experiment is a learning assessment for that one
kid it is also used as a teaching tool when everybody
else walks around and learns about it.
And the unique thing is the way that it builds on each other,
and it's not, you're not valuing the artists over the non-artists
because everybody can learn to work with PowerPoint
and Microsoft Paint, and I've extended this from just
a teaching methodology and authentic assessment learning
activity where I've published different articles
on the critical thinking behind it.
That was one and then another one on why these technologies
are more efficient and effective than using hand drawn cartoons.
I've also categorized them, which type of political cartoons
are best for learning assessments, which ones are most
demonstrable of expressing and understanding, and also which
ones are the best teaching tools, and I've also organized
how different graphic organizers, how different
subtitutionalist or different methodological steps can enable
students to more aptly construct their understandings using
this visual media.
In the meantime what I'm focusing on since I've defined
the critical thinking skills that are involved in this,
and since I've defined different ways, different steps to work
with this, and since I've been working with different graphic
organizers and different methodological steps for
teachers to use with their students to get adolescents more
aptly construct and express understandings.
I've also tried to examine how it effects learning because
it's one thing to say that this is engaging and enticing
methodological step or that this is an authentic way to assess
student's learning, it's another thing to examine
how did they learn.
And one of the things that I'm doing right now,
two of the things in two different classrooms,
I'm examining, I'm currently investigating how if teachers
taught a unit one way and then gave a test, a formative
assessment test at the end one way, and they did this last year
how would it be if they were to do the exact same lessons
this year with the same content with the same tests but instead
have two or three days of where one or two days they're
creating and sharing original presentations, and then the
next day they're interpreting original political cartoons
and their presentations.
And I'm trying to measure the effect on formative assessments,
how much these authentic assessments impact student's
learning as demonstrated through their scores
on formative assessment.
That's one of the things I'm examining, another thing I'm
examining, is when it comes to students expressing what their
understanding in a political cartoon, how do students
of different ages and different cognitive abilities express
and understand their opinions through original
political cartoons.
I'm working with one teacher in particular where she has a group
of students in her classroom, she has three different groups
of students that are homogeneously grouped by high,
middle and low achieving students as determined by
different summative assessments on ISATs and map scores.
And I'm examining right now how the highest of kids
and the lowest of learners, how they express and understand
themselves differently and it's very unique seeing where
the encoded messages that the different cognitive abilities
students can express and also the different ages,
and this is mostly with 6th and 8th graders just for
compare and contrast points.
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