Multimedia Pedagogy and Multicultural Education for the New Millennium
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Abstract As we enter a new millennium, a dramatic technological revolution is providing tools for the reconstruction of education. In particular, multimedia technologies are producing new resources and making materials available for expanding education. In this article, we examine the Shoah Project, which uses multimedia to document the experiences of Holocaust survivors, and demonstrate the way it makes historical events vivid and compelling in the contemporary moment. Yet we also argue that effective use of multimedia in the teaching of history, religion, and multiculturalism requires historical contextualization, attention to media literacy skills, and an engaging classroom presentation. |
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Introduction
Teachers of 20th century history and religion struggle with how to teach the Holocaust, one of the most disturbing events of the era. Simply citing statistics and retelling the story of concentration camps and the murder of over six million Jews and others from various ethnic and minority groups cannot adequately convey the enormity of the event. We believe that multimedia technology can help provide students with a sense of the horror, inhumanity, and magnitude of the Holocaust. Oral and video testimony delivered by ordinary citizens, as well as political leaders, helps demonstrate the human and personal dimension of history and dramatizes the effects of historical events on people. The interactive dimension of new technologies has the potential to involve students more fully in historical research and thereby to enhance their understanding. In the case of studying the Holocaust, this deepening of understanding provides the opportunity to teach tolerance and promote a multicultural and antiracist curriculum.
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Teaching the Unthinkable: The Shoah Project The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation is tucked away in the Hollywood Hills of California, not far from the famous Hollywood sign. Established by the movie director Steven Spielberg, the foundation uses the most advanced multimedia digital technology available to document the impact of the Holocaust by capturing the experiences of its survivors. Although films and television productions have attempted to tell the stories of victims of the Nazi Holocaust, or “Shoah” (a Hebrew word meaing “destruction” or “annihilation”), until this project little had been done to capture the actual testimony of those who managed to survive. And rather than simply filming survivors in traditional linear, static, “talking head” style, the project uses digital footage distributed with interactive multimedia components produced by some of the most creative minds in the fields of technology, education, and media production. Layers of material -- incuding maps, archival film clips from the Nazi era, related music, and sound effects -- accompany the testimonies. The result is an experience in multiple dimensions that allows viewers to gain better contextual understanding. The video testimony of survivors seen in conjunction with interactive multimedia material humanizes the Holocaust while promoting in-depth involvement that makes its horrors all the more striking and real. It is ironic that the nonprofit Shoah foundation, with its innovative form of politicized, contextual, humanistic, multimedia pedagogy, exists in large part because of the inspiration, commitment, and financial support of Steven Spielberg, one of the most successful members of the Hollywood community. Hollywood is frequently demonized for producing the “commercial junk” assumed to contribute to the problems plaguing contemporary youth. Yet it was during the filming of Schindler’s List, his commercially successful 1993 movie about the relationship between a German war profiteer and the Polish Jewish employees of his factory that he protected, that Spielberg decided to initiate the Shoah foundation. Spielberg was provoked, largely through personal encounters with survivors during production of his acclaimed and award-winning film, to capture the experiences of real people as they, rather than actors, described them. To do this, he pursued and applied new multimedia technology in developing new types of educational and historical tools. The result is perhaps the most significant historical archive of an oppressed people ever produced and a dramatic demonstration of the pedagogical potential of new multimedia technology. The project draws on the expertise of scholars and specialists from diverse technological, artistic, and educational fields. It was initially directed by Michael Berenbaum, a respected Holocaust historian and former director of the research institute of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., one of the most advanced and impressive museums in the world in terms of its use of multimedia technology. (Berenbaum has now been succeeded by Douglas Greenberg.) Since 1994, the project has archived more than 51,000 eyewitness accounts in 32 languages from 57 countries. Freelance videographers and interviewers undergo training sessions organized by the foundation and base their interviews primarily on a specially designed questionnaire. Individuals who survived life in the concentration camps and other horrors of the Holocaust are asked to describe their pre- and post-war experiences, as well as their wartime ordeals. The unedited videotapes are duplicated once they arrive at the Shoah foundation headquarters, with copies made for the participants and for safe storage in two locations: one in California and the other at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (eventually, tapes will be moved from Washington to a storage facility in Israel). A further copy is coded for documentation purposes, and a digitized version of each tape is created to facilitate computer accessibility. The tapes are checked periodically by resource people at the foundation, who review their quality and provide assistance and support to individual interviewers. The “customized cataloguing interface” for each tape is one of the most impressive aspects of the project in both technical and pedagogical terms. Using a complex documentation system comprising an ever-growing number of categories and keywords, professionals analyze and categorize the tapes, breaking each testimony down into 3 and 4-minute vignettes. In addition, multiple aspects of the survivors’ experiences are organized and indexed under topics that can be called up for future use or projects. Each interview takes about 8 hours to index. The final versions of the testimonies include multimedia and interactive components: documentary footage, maps, and iconic oral materials as mentioned earlier, along with the option to access associated interviews, Web sites, and other arenas of learning. Indeed, eventually there will be links between the Shoah institutional holdings through networks to a variety of museums, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations around the world. The foundation is also involved in distributing its archival material through development of documentaries, books, and educational CD-ROMs. Cumulatively, these products provide valuable educational materials and documentation of human nobility, spirit, and the courage to survive and transcend the dehumanizing atrocities of Germany’s Nazi era. The Shoah foundation’s archive of testimonials serves not only to chronicle individual experience and perseverance, but as an innovative pedagogical source for promoting study of the Holocaust in terms of particular instances of oppression and the more general features of German fascism. Moreover, the tapes contest the pernicious stereotype of Jews as sheep being led to the slaughter -- a myth that has been perpetuated for far too long and has done significant damage and disservice to the Jewish people. The prevalent stereotype of the victim passively accepting his or her fate also does injustice to the world’s many other sufferers of abuse and torture. One of the most moving portions of each video is a segment at the end in which the interviewee introduces her or his family, shows pictures or news clippings, reads from letters or journals, and shares any additional material he or she feels is relevant; this segment, which moves away from the interview format, often provides the most powerful memorial to the survivors and victims. Indeed, the project itself is not confined to video documentation and databases but contributes to the production of other forms, such as documentary films that incorporate its material and expand on its techniques. For example, the poignant 1998 documentary The Last Days, winner of an Academcy Award, effectively mobilized Shoah foundation material, as have five forthcoming documentaries. We will not attempt to describe the indescribable horrors of the Holocaust in this article; it would obviously be inappropriate to recount the experiences captured in the Shoah foundation’s records here. Our purpose is to stress the documentary value of the archival material and its pedagogical significance, as well as the potential for human empowerment offered by the form content of these testimonies. The survivors’ stories are a source of strength for those who have felt alone, isolated, or marginalized by their victimization, and a source of inspiration for all of humanity. For students, exposure to these gripping multimedia materials should be compelling, poignant, and instructive, transcending the often abstract modes of teaching that frequently fail to capture the personal and human dimension of history, especially of suffering and struggle. The multimedia presentation of the Holocaust also overcomes the tendency in some educational circles to divide and isolate one subject or dimension from another. Such abstracted and decontextualized instruction often neutralizes associations among disparate skills, dimensions, and areas of learning. By contrast, combining sights, sounds, and print provides a multidimensional context for historical events, and the combination of historical documentation and personal testimony enhances the possibility of both historical and moral learning. Back to menu
New Educational Technology: Challenges and Potential Many current criticisms of computers and multimedia technology in instruction stem from a lack of understanding of the nature and importance of computer literacy and of how new technologies can contribute to a revitalization of education. In the past, media, primarily film and television, were often used as a supplement or as a way for the teacher to take a break from the arduous activity of interacting creatively with students. Even today, with media and technology proliferating in the schools, media literacy is rarely taught, and imaginative use of media materials in the classroom occurs all too seldom. Even in colleges of education where teachers are taught how to teach, media, computer, and technological literacies are rarely discussed, though there is some pressure developing to address this lack (see Burbules & Callister, 2000; Luke, 1997; Kellner, 1998, 2000). Traditionally, print literacy has held a position of privilege in education. A form of elitism has blinded many educational theorists to the significance of media in the everyday lives of both teachers and students. Luke (1996) is perceptive in her claim that ”the everyday televisual and popular cultural texts that students encounter are at least as, if not more, significant sources of learning than the print texts educators deem as culturally relevant literacy texts” (p. 78). These common and shared media materials could be employed to intensify and enhance the experience of education, but this has not often been done. Further, instruction has generally failed to develop the critical skills and analytic abilities that empower both teacher and student in their interactions with media in all its forms. Yet, in this computer era, critical media literacy is essential for understanding and navigating within ever more complex technological and ideological forms such as CD-ROMs and the World Wide Web. Indeed, there is a broadening mismatch between student experience, subjectivities, and culture and the institution of schooling (see Luke & Luke, in press, for a discussion of these ideas and a strong argument for emphasizing multiple literacies in instruction). In general, media and computer literacy enable students to seek information and knowledge more actively, and also give students the skills they need to produce and develop their own cultural artifacts both in and out of school. It is inspiring to see the Web sites and other artifacts that students are producing, often collaboratively, with computer and multimedia technologies. In view of the increased role of computers in business, higher education, and everyday life, such skills will be increasingly necessary for full and creative participation in society. This is not to suggest that the instructional use of media and computer technology is inherently superior and without limitations. Indeed, we believe that print literacy and the fundamentals of education are more necessary than ever in today’s “high-tech” information age (Kellner, 2000). In a world of information overload, it is increasingly important to teach students the skills of critical reading and analysis, and clear and concise writing. Moreover, a good classroom teacher can provide context, appropriate application of course material to students’ situations, and a place for discussion and interaction that computers cannot provide. But we also believe that it is the responsibility of educators to make use of all available technologies for educational purposes. The relationship between print media and multimedia technology, as well as between classroom teaching and computerized teaching tools, is not an either-or situation, but rather inclusive -- a sort of “both-and.” In this conception, multimedia and print supplement each other, as do computers and classroom teaching. We owe it to our students to help them develop the skills and acquire the tools necessary to participate in new labor markets, to access new forms of information and entertainment, and to become active citizens in new technologically mediated societies. Yet traditional educators persist in blaming media and technology for declining test scores and in defending problematic tools like Internet filtering software and the television V chip that enable censorship of material deemed objectionable by some third party. It would seem more productive to teach students how to access and appreciate worthwhile educational and cultural media and to engage in critical analysis. Often censoring material makes it more appealing and seductive, so we recommend critical engagement with media materials rather than simple prohibition. We also recommend that media production be incorporated in the classroom. Despite the fact that inexpensive video equipment is widely available in both schools and universities, teachers rarely teach students how to use the equipment to produce their own contemporary media forms. We have found that the production of alternative forms or parodies of commercial media -- anti-commercials or anti-rock videos, for instance -- can break through barriers and extend the critical educational process in many exciting directions (Hammer, 1995). Unfortunately, it seems far more common for teachers to use film, video, or other media forms as a less valuable supplement to a printed text. Moreover, if actual practical applications of media production are taught and incorporated within the classroom setting, they are often addressed with condescension and made the responsibility of technical support staff who generally do not have the qualifications or interest to teach the necessary semiotic skills and analytical concepts of media literacy. Furthermore, the main authority figure, the classroom teacher or professor, often diminishes the importance of this kind of work and this kind of literacy by the very lack of demonstrated skill or interest in learning about it. Hence arises the illogical but common practice of blaming the victim -- or, in this case, the student -- and the technology itself. The computer has become an object of disdain and disrespect within some education settings and contexts. Like the television programming and Hollywood films that have been blamed by so many educators for the failings of contemporary students, computer software and Internet technologies are also being demonized. Some object to computer games; others complain that students spend too much time on e-mail, in chatrooms, or surfing the Web, or use the Internet to cheat on assignments and engage in plagiarism. Many educators simply denounce new computer technologies rather than embarking on serious exploration of how such tools can be used to enhance education and further research. Others make the admittedly compelling argument that the new technologies are far more accessible to the middle and upper classes and thus reinforce class hierarchies. But these educators focus on criticizing and pay scant attention to devising strategies to ensure that disadvantaged and subordinate groups have access to computer education and technologies. Criticizing or dismissing new technologies manifests a refusal to confront the need to restructure education and to cultivate multimedia and computer literacies among all social groups. Teachers need to join political coalitions that seek to make new technologies more accessible to the underprivileged student populations. Such coalitions require networking with grass-roots organizations, official and unofficial lobby groups, and research and grant organizations. They also require teachers to strive publicly to make schooling responsive to the need to cultivate democratic citizens and relevant to the challenges of a new economy and culture (Giroux, 2000). What is needed is a philosophical and pedagogical shift toward positive deployment of new technologies for educational purposes and democratic social transformation. This reconstructive process should seek to empower and enlighten both teachers and students and to assist them in recognizing the difference between good and bad, mediocre and beneficial. Teachers and students should learn to evaluate new cultural forms in the same manner in which they have longed judged and evaluated print material. This approach, however, necessitates a commitment to teaching media, computer, and multimedia literacies, and to incorporating the best of these programs in the classroom (Kellner, 1998, 2000). Back to menu
Education Reform and the Shoah Project Resources such as those of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation have great potential for new approaches to education. For example, to some non-Jews, Jews exist in an area outside of familiar experience. Multimedia technology makes accessible this “otherness,” personalizing individuals and making it possible to see, hear, and experience the views, practices, and culture of groups outside of one’s ordinary life and interaction. In particular, multimedia can dramatize oppression, making intolerance and bigotry vivid and striking, showing the evil effects of racism and prejudice, and serve in the teaching of tolerance and moral behavior -- as well as history, religion, philosophy, and other subject matter. Indeed, the Shoah foundation has chosen to illuminate a variety of forms of fascist oppression in addition to the slaughter of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. The next phase of its work will document other groups and individuals who suffered under the Nazi regime, including Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, those deemed physically or mentally challenged or different, and those who resisted the official doctrines of the “master race.” Moreover, the Shoah foundation is beginning to chronicle the largely unsung heroes and heroines who refused to collaborate and put their lives at risk by assisting those identified as enemies of the Third Reich. Celebrating the lives and sacrifices of those who resisted fascism is an important lesson for the future and a necessary aspect of properly understanding the past. The Shoah project shows clearly how new technologies can advance and revitalize education for today’s students. Their educational effectiveness, of course, depends on who implements them, and how. A democratic and multicultural reconstruction of education requires the commitment, critical intelligence, and hard work of teachers dedicated to helping students truly learn about the world and, hence, about themselves and their place in this world. Teachers will find that the positive response to multimedia from most students will be of great assistance in motivating their learning and transforming key historical experiences and knowledge. A transformative media pedagogy thus helps broaden the curriculum and brings voices, experiences, and material into the educational process that are often downplayed or ignored in traditional educational texts and materials. Back to menu
Historical Education and Multimedia: UCLA’s Executive Order 9066 The Shoah project, to be sure, has tremendous resources behind it, but, as Steve Ricci, the director of the film and television archives at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and his colleagues have demonstrated, it is not necessary to have an enormous budget to produce highly effective interactive educational materials. Ricci and his colleagues coproduced with the Japanese American National Museum a highly sophisticated CD-ROM, arresting and absorbing in both form and content. And, like the Shoah project, Executive Order 9066: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II bursts disciplinary boundaries and traditional compartmentalized learning to produce a transdisciplinary, multilevel portrayal of a cruel and blatantly racist government program. This riveting multimedia, interactive project documents how 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated by the United States government in internment camps during World War II. Allowing users to navigate among photographs, diary excerpts, and home movies of life in the camps to newsreels, essays, and other media texts, the CD-ROM provides a contextual framework to understand the historical events and humanizes the experience of their victims and survivors. It also contains information often omitted -- such as the collusion of some Latin American countries with the displacement and internment in the United States of over 2,000 people of Japanese ancestry from these countries, on the highly dubious charges that they posed security risks. Like the Shoah project, the UCLA CD-ROM stresses the necessity of revisiting and re-examining painful and repugnant instances of large-scale legitimized programs of persecution and inhumanity, helping to ensure that we do not forget and repeat, reproduce, falsify, or gloss over these atrocities. Employing a multiplicity of innovative technological devices, archival and documentary footage, maps, photographs, oral histories, interview material, personal accounts, chronologies, and historical essays, Executive Order 9066 provides a vivid historical reconstruction of the events. The CD uses familiar Japanese American actors and celebrities as narrators, and includes many of their own testimonies. This content further humanizes the shameful episode, as well as demonstrating the courage of those who are too often portrayed as victims. The CD also demonstrates that propensities toward intolerance and persecution lie within all of us and within the frameworks of supposedly democratic, liberal, and egalitarian governments. The production reveals that crimes against humanity are not restricted to peoples and nations that are commonly identified as evil, totalitarian, fascist, undemocratic, or “other,” and hence teaches some very discomfiting truths. Executive Order 9066 permits students to learn at their own speeds and levels of expertise. It also facilitates both individual and class-based teacher-student multimedia tutorials, investigations, and assignments. The CD-ROM thus exemplifies the calls for multimedia-based projects to enhance and transform education. It is exactly the kind of multimedia project essential for contemporary teaching, the sort of resource that may help remedy the situation evoked by current studies that appear to demonstrate waning basic skills and literacies among students, as well as serious lack of historical and political knowledge and awareness. These new transdisciplinary multimedia projects include multiple educational arenas within an underlying common, critical, and political theme. Such projects make it possible to teach not only “the basics,” but also disciplines such as political science, economics, and sociology. Instead of decontextualizing historical events and divorcing them from reality, the multimedia and CD-ROM projects discussed here provide exceptional opportunities for developing contextualized understanding of the many dimensions of political oppression, as well as for teaching tolerance and the importance of resisting racist and oppressive behavior. Thus, by bringing to the fore the human dimensions of persecution, multimedia technology can also serve as an instrument of moral and political education. Back to menu
References Burbules, N.C., & Callister, T.A. (2000). Watch IT: The risks and promises of information technologies for education. Boulder, CO: Westview. Giroux, H. (2000). Impure acts: The practical politics of cultural studies. New York: Routledge. Hammer, R. (1995). Strategies for media literacy. In P. McLaren, R. Hammer, D. Sholle, & S. Reilly (Eds.), Rethinking media literacy: A critical pedagogy of representation (pp. 225-235). New York: Peter Lang. Kellner, D. (1998). Multiple literacies and critical pedagogy in a multicultural society. Educational Theory, 48(1), 103-122. Kellner, D. (2000). New technologies/new literacies: Reconstructing education for the new millennium. Teaching Education, 11(3), 245-265. Luke, A., & Luke, C. (in press). Adolescence lost/childhood regained: On early intervention and the emergence of the techno-subject. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. Luke, C. (1996). Reading gender and culture in media discourses and texts. In G. Bull & M. Anstey (Eds.), The literacy lexicon. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Luke, C. (1997). Technological literacy. Melbourne, Australia: Adult Literacy Research Network/National Language & Literacy Institute of Australia. About the Authors Rhonda Hammer is a research scholar with the Center for the Study of Women at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She has taught courses in feminism, communications, cultural studies, sociology, and video production at the University of Toronto, York University (also in Toronto), and the University of Windsor, all in Ontario, Canada; the Tampere School of Communications in Finland; and most recently at UCLA and the University of Southern California. Rhonda is also an educational video producer and the author of several articles, chapters, and books in the areas of feminism, communications, and media literacy. Her book Anti-Feminism and Family Terrorism: A Critical Feminist Perspective will be published later this year by Rowman and Littlefield. Contact Rhonda by e-mail at rhammer@ucla.edu. Douglas Kellner holds the George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at UCLA. His many books on social theory, politics, history, and culture include Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (coauthored with Michael Ryan); Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity; Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond; Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (with Steven Best); Television and the Crisis of Democracy; The Persian Gulf TV War, Media Culture; and The Postmodern Turn (also with Steven Best). Forthcoming are Bush Coup: The Media and the Theft of Election 2000, a book on the most recent U.S. presidential election, The Postmodern Adventure (coauthored by Steve Best), and Media Spectacle. His e-mail address is kellner@ucla.edu. To print this article, point and click your mouse anywhere on the text; then use your browser’s print command. Citation: Hammer, R., & Kellner, D. (2001, May). Multimedia pedagogy and multicultural education for the new millennium. Reading Online, 4(10). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=/newliteracies/hammer/index.html Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
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Posted May 2001
© 2001 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232