Producing Multimedia Stories with ESL Children: A Partnership Approach

This article describes the development of multimedia stories produced by ESL children using a children-as-designers approach. The rationale for the project was based on the use of technology to help second-language learning children express their culturally-diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Stories were produced by ten foreign-born international children from six countries working with nine educational technology graduate students from the USA and three other countries. Qualitative methods were used throughout the semester-long project to observe children, take field notes to document the process, capture design artifacts, conduct formative evaluation and final interviews, and write process reflections. The multimedia stories that emerged were rich expressions of children's culturally-diverse perspectives related to their folklore, family beliefs, and adjustments to a new country. The children successfully participated as design partners by writing and illustrating their stories and by sharing decisions about multimedia features in the stories. Although challenged by the one-semester timeline to learn high-level multimedia software and complete the stories, graduate students were positive about their experience working with children in an authentic design project. The results support the effectiveness of technology as an intercultural, collaborative bridge to support multicultural education and student-centered learning for children as well as developers. ********** One of the challenges facing educators is to weave multicultural education throughout the curriculum in meaningful ways. Multicultural education focuses on building understanding and equity across students from diverse racial, ethnic, social-class, and cultural groups. An important part of this goal is to help children interact and communicate with people from diverse groups (Banks & Banks, 1995; Moore-Hart, 1995). Technology is a medium that may provide a bridge to bring students together across age and cultural differences. This multimedia-writing project was an intercultural collaborative venture between graduate students in a university educational technology course and elementary children in an English as a second language (ESL) public school class. The rationale for the project was based on the use of technology to help second-language learning children express their culturally-diverse backgrounds and perspectives through multimedia story writing. In order to produce the stories, a university/school partnership was implemented based on a new approach in software design that focuses on working with children as design partners (Druin, 1999, 2002). Nonnative (to USA) ESL children from the countries of Bosnia, Turkey, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Rwanda wrote and illustrated stories to retell folktales from their native countries or write creative stories based on their experiences. University students, themselves representing four different countries, were enrolled in a software design and development class and partnered with the children to turn their stories into interactive, multimedia stories with cultural images, trilingual text and narration, animation, and sound effects. When completed, the stories were placed onto CDs for dissemination to families, the school, and university classes. STORY WRITING AS COMMUNICATION WITH SECOND-LANGUAGE LEARNERS Literacy is the core for children learning to communicate in a new language. Communication requires meaning, and it encompasses reading, writing, and speaking. Social communication and meaningful tasks within cooperative groups are motivating approaches for stimulating language learning and fluency in literacy skills (Egbert, 2002; Johns & Torrez, 2001; Krashen & Terrell, 1983). Multicultural literacy experiences help second-language learners from different cultures improve performance as well as appreciate their own culture and the cultures of others. …