J. David Betts, Ph.D.

University of Arizona

A&L SIG AERA Annual Meeting -

New Orleans, LA, April 24-28 2000

It’s 3:30 PM on a hot Wednesday. Maria is leaving her bilingual middle school through the side door, hurrying across the parking lot to the corner. The bus is right on time. She uses her bus pass to get to the local arts council building. This is her third semester at the multimedia lab program. Four afternoons a week she’s been learning to use computers to make graphics and create animations. This semester she’s using a computer to write and publish a book of her own in the language art/desktop publishing lab.

As her bus winds under the railroad tracks and into the downtown area the air-conditioner strains. Leaning against the window, Maria is thinking about a new verse for the poem she is working on about her grandmother.

At 4:00 she’s inside the cool building taking her turn to put out the snacks.

The teachers are already there. Tom, a graphic artist; Nancy, who teaches English at the community college; Jane, a free-lance video producer; and Travis a computer person who teachers animation and helps keep the local network running between the four classrooms and the server. Terry, the art education director, is there. She’s talking with Cisco’s parents. Cisco has been having trouble being on time. A letter had gone home yesterday.

The arts council, a large space shared with an art gallery and community arts offices, fills up quickly as the forty or so kids come in from the buses and parents drop them off in the parking lot. Most of them are in the fifth or sixth grade, about half girls and half boys from more than a dozen schools around town. Most are Hispanic, most are low income.

About 4:20 or so snacks are put away, the labs fill up, and a business-like hubbub commences with concentrated activity. The five Mac computers in the graphics lab and the six Amigas in the animation lab are busy with one or two kids each working on their design ideas and stories. Celene, a student at the university and one of four teaching assistants, works with one boy who is having trouble organizing his ideas for his animated PSA. Part of the video class is shooting in the parking lot, while the other are recording their voice-overs and working out special effects. At the big tables groups of people are discussing their storyboards while others are working in pencil on drawing tablets as they create characters for their animations.

In the language arts lab, Maria is on her Mac, ignoring the rest of what is going on, writing down the ideas she had for finishing her poem. She had shared it at home with her grandparents at dinner last night and felt real good about the changes she had m de.

Nancy, the artist/teacher for Language Arts, is, among other things, a free-lance writer. She is talking about what they’re going to do at tomorrow’s all-program meeting. It’s their turn to report on what they’ve been working on in their lab. Most of the class has done it before, so they can be matter-of-fact. The two new boys were nervous about it. Nick, the teaching assistant, helps them reflect on what they’ve accomplished so far. Nick is majoring in English composition at the university.

Next door, in the Graphics lab, they are just ending their critique session. Everybody’s work is up on the wall. They all spent a half-hour reacting to each other’s work and listening to ideas. Some moved on to work at the computers and others went out to the common room. Ramon sat at a table to sketch out some ideas for his personal logo. He’s found a font he likes in Adobe PhotoshopÔ . He’s making the logo for a local low rider club like the one his uncle belongs to.

In the Animation lab, Karina is adding cels to her first animation while Travis watches and they discuss the frame rate. Three kids are working on a background for the stop-motion figures they created out of clay. Two girls are in the Video lab working on the storyboard with members of the video part of the team

Selena, working on another video project, is outside carrying the camera around the corner of the arts council building to set up another shot for their story about a downtown restaurant and the folks who run the nearby soup kitchen.

José, teaching assistant for the video production lab, explains. "Next week the skills benchmarks are due. Kids who demonstrate that they can use the tools will get a twenty-five dollar check." Half the group moans and the others give a little cheer. "After that, your independent project proposals need to be done." The kids will write an abstract of the project and outline a production schedule. These projects are negotiated with the artist/teacher. When they are finished at the end of the semester, the kids get another $25.

Maria looked forward to tomorrow’s class for two reasons, it was interesting to see the other kids tell about what they were doing in their labs, and she got to see her friend Marci who was in the portfolio class. Marci was in high school and about to graduate from the program. For her multimedia project, Marci was using some pictures that Maria had helped her find on the Internet.

The Portfolio group meets at the end of the week, Thursday and Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings. Kids in Portfolio have completed the other four labs and are developing a portfolio of their work over the past few years in the program. They can revisit and revise their earlier work and create new materials for a multimedia portfolio. They learn to use HyperStudioÔ . Maria thought that would be an interesting program to use and curious to learn more.

Everybody , in Portfolio especially, is working hard to get something ready to show at the graduation when all the parents come to see what they have been hearing about. They’re selecting the best of their video programs, animations, poems, graphic designs When they finish their last semester successfully, they will each get a computer and a printer to take home.
 

(The above is a compilation and dramatization of the experience of the Multimedia Arts Education Center’s program in art technology for middle school students in Tucson, AZ. "Maria" is just a typical student who has made a commitment to five semesters of computer and design training in order to earn a home computer.)
 

Middle school students often get to use computers at school, but these school experiences are, by report of students and teachers alike, limited to scheduled lab times and word processing. Many lower income families can not afford a computer at home to supplement these activities. The arts related affordances of multimedia computers are very seldom a part of the technology experience of middle school students.

In order to understand the effects of the Multimedia Arts Education Center’s program of art technology in an after school lab setting we have undertaken to follow several individual students through the program. They were chosen from 38 middle school and high school students who completed the program. The earliest of our cases started in spring of 1996, graduating in summer of 1997 and the most recent started in spring of 1997 and graduated in spring of 1999. Each of their individual progressions through the MAEC program was in a different sequence of labs and some took longer to finish than others. Students were allowed to take off two semesters as they completed the five labs.

MAEC is an intensive computer-mediated arts technology program begun in 1996 by the Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC). Middle school youth, targeted as being at risk from disadvantaged families, participate in a series of semester-long after school classes. The program is based on several literacies. Central to all the activities are written output from students consisting of journals, proposals, and descriptive abstracts, as well as poems and stories that are realized in video, computer-mediated animation or graphics. Students work in labs with professionals in computer graphics and publishing, language arts and word processing, computer animation, and video production. A final, fifth semester portfolio class capitalizes on cumulative skills and yields a home page, a newsletter and a multimedia presentation.

Population

Approximately 8 - 10 middle school students were enrolled in each of the five labs each semester. Most were Hispanic and bilingual in Spanish to some extent. Most started the program during the sixth grade. A balance of male and female students was maintained by selection. Families must qualify for the free or reduced lunch program at their school and not already have a computer in the home. Students are not auditioned for this program.

MAEC youth who were selected based on factors contributing to high-drop out rates. Of the 44 students in the Spring1998 program, all but two were on free or reduced lunch programs at their school. 54% were bilingual Spanish, 79% Hispanic, 7% Native American, 7% African American and 7% Anglo. There is now a waiting list of interested students and families. Most live in neighborhoods near downtown Tucson with low graduation rates. Students are required to maintain a "c" average in school in order to continue in MAEP.

Theory

The integration of art into education facilitates the construction of new knowledge by young people based on this mediation. New facts are engaged with new skills in new media. These skills call forth new ideas and the transmediation of those ideas in a reciprocating spiral of learning (Salomon, 1990). The artistic content of the actions and operations of the MAEC provides a parallel means of connection or engagement for the learner.

Leland and Harste (1994) define literacy in terms of transmediation, or "movement between and among communication systems" (p. 340). MAEC provides many opportunities for students to transmediate between sign systems, such as placing the words of a poem onto an illustration, or animating drawn characters from a storyboard. The computer mediates the artistic expression of the student’s new ideas.

Those new ideas can come from any area of a child's life, including, as Moll (1992) writes, the "funds of knowledge" that are in family and neighborhood. The infusion of technology into the students’ lives at the MAEC, and ultimately into their families’ lives has an effect that ricochets among the several domains including school. Eisner (1994) acknowledges the importance of connections between school knowledge and students' lives outside of the academic environment. Transfer of learning will occur, Eisner asserts, when students encounter tasks and relationships similar to those outside of school.

The Multimedia Arts Education Center

The MAEC views the arts as a critical factor in the mastery of computer and media technology. The MAEC teachers are professionals in their area of art technology, each with several years teaching experience. The large TPAC building, with several computer labs, also includes an art gallery. Many local artists pass through and influence the culture of the facility.

The curricula used in the labs each include art and design, technology, and literacy components. Students learn several professional level application programs and tools. They learn to make æsthetic considerations in design, to develop a critical eye and to revise. They keep journals and write proposals for their projects and create storyboards, video logs and scripts, as well as poems and stories.

The Language Arts lab students do word processing and basic desktop publishing. There is an emphasis on basic English grammar and composition. The Computer Graphics lab students learn to do computer photo-manipulation, drawing and printing. Various projects such as letterhead, calendars and logos involve integration of many electronic arts tools. The Animation students develop narrative storyboards and two-dimensional computer animations. The Video lab has several camera kits with lights and microphones, editors, and a special effects generator. Students learn to use this equipment and basic production techniques as they work through group and individual projects. The Portfolio lab emphasis is on developing multimedia presentations based on their work from previous semesters.

The students receive a small stipend ($25) twice each semester upon attaining the required skill level benchmarks and completion of their individual projects. When they complete the program, each student receives a desktop computer of his or her own. This has been a very motivating aspect of the program, as most of the families involved are not able to have a computer at home.
 
 

Methodology

Coordination of qualitative and quantitative data gathering techniques helps to yield a picture of the nature and dynamics of this program. Combining tools for description and scene setting, and tools for measuring responses, through the tool of language to tell the story of this activity system. Participant observation by university students working as teaching assistants in the labs helps us to understand the lab and program activities. Interviews with the graduating students and their parents help us to understand the context from which the students have come and how they viewed their participation in the program. Hopefully we will know something of what they brought to the program and what they took from it, what their family lives were like and how it was related to the individual and group story. Working closely with the teachers and the director, attending their meetings and discussions has allowed us to document the development of the curricula and procedures. Finally, data from the perceived self-efficacy and attitude questionnaires, pre-and post-lab skill tests, journals, and artifacts also contribute to our story telling and greater understanding.

Research questions

This ethnographic research will supplement the longitudinal study of which it is a part. So much data has been collected that it will be important to know the context of the activity itself. Thick description may help us to understand the results of the other observational and measurement tools that we are using to understand the program’s nature and dynamics.

The longitudinal study is designed to track: a) students’ success in high school; b) the impact of the program on extended families; and c) the impact of the program on students’ college and/or career goals. The study will look at a) the development of the MAEC, its curricula and management; b) the development of students’ perceived self-efficacy and attitudes about art technology; c) literacy skills development; d) evidence of aesthetic response; and e) school-to-work skills acquisition.

Cases

In order to understand the effects of the Multimedia Arts Education Center’s program of art technology in an after school lab setting we have undertaken to follow several individual students through the program. They were chosen from the 38 middle school students who completed the program. The earliest started in spring of 1996, graduating in summer of 1997, and the most recent started in spring of 1997 and graduated in spring of 1999. You can see from the flow chart in the table below (Table One. Case studies) that their progress through the MAEC program was each by a different sequence of labs, and that some took longer to finish than others.
 
 
 
 

Table One. Case Studies

At this writing three of the first program graduates above, are graduating from high school. All headed for college, one with a two year scholarship, the other as student body president of her high school. All computer literate and giving testimonials for their MAEP experiences.
 
 
 
 

Works Cited

Bandura, A. (1993) Perceived self-efficacy in cognitive development and functioning. Educational Psychologist. 28(2), 117-148

Eisner, E. W. (1994). Cognition and curriculum reconsidered. New York: Teachers College Press.

Leland, C. H., & J. C. Harste. (1994). Multiple ways of knowing: Curriculum in a new key. Language Arts, 71, 337-344.

Moll, L. and Greenberg, J. "Creating zones of possibilities: Combining social contexts for instruction". In Luis Moll (1992) (Ed) Vygotsky and Education, New York, NY:Cambridge University Press.