The Expansion of Digital Storytelling into Content Area Instruction

To help attract new graduate students and also to help integrate technology into content area courses, faculty members at the University of Houston began teaching “linked” pairs of courses in 2006, by combining a graduate course on digital photography and storytelling with a popular culture in education course. Based on the success of this coupling, another pair of linked courses, combining digital photography and storytelling with a course on the Historical Development of Children’s Literature, was developed in 2008. In this article, the authors discuss the need for these linked courses, the benefits to students and instructors, and an overview of the specific technology tools and resources used in the courses. Dealing with a Decline in Master’s Degree Enrollments Over the past several years, the number of Master’s students enrolling in Instructional Technology (IT) courses at the University of Houston has seen a gradual decline. Although the number of doctoral students has remained the same, or even increased over the past five years, the number of Master’s students admitted to the IT program, one of twelve program areas within the Curriculum and Instruction Department, has declined significantly. Since 2003, Master’s student enrollment in the IT Program area has declined approximately 60% (University of Houston, 2008). Faculty members in the IT Program have investigated the cause of this decline and found several possible causes. One factor is that enrollments have been affected by the changing state of technology both in schools and throughout society. A decade ago, many students enrolled in the IT Master’s Program because they wanted to learn more about computers and how to harness the power of instructional technology. In the mid 1990s, a rush of new technologies became available that could be integrated into the classroom and facilitate instruction in new and unexpected ways. Many students applied to our program hoping to learn to design websites, create and evaluate distance education projects and gain skills in developing multimedia-rich instructional materials. However, as computer technology has become more affordable and easier to use, individuals who earlier might have considered pursuing a Master’s degree in IT found they no longer needed this degree to gain technology skills and expertise. The growth of the World Wide Web has provided potential students with access to numerous technology tutorials and answers to their most frequently asked questions, some of the same information they would receive in Instructional Technology Master’s courses. Although, our IT Master’s Program contains a varied mix of theory and hands-on application courses, we believe some of the decrease in enrollments is due to the fact that graduate courses are just one of many ways technology skills can be acquired today. Another factor that has contributed to the reduced number of Master’s students enrolling in our IT courses is the reduced incentive for in-service teachers to return to graduate school to pursue a Master’s degree. In the public school system in Texas, a Master’s degree is not a requirement to become a certified teacher, and in-service teachers who do earn a Master’s degree find that the increase in pay they receive once they obtain the degree amounts to only a fraction of the cost that was spent obtaining it. In the past, many in-service teachers came into the IT Master’s Program, hoping they would be able to move out of the classroom and into a position as a technology specialist or facilitator for their school or district upon completion of the degree. However, over the last few years, schools and districts in southeast Texas have markedly reduced the number of these positions, and many existing teachers, curriculum specialists, and librarians who do not possess a Master’s degree are being hired for these remaining jobs. Additionally, the ever increasing cost of tuition and fees students must pay to complete a Master’s degree is one more reason we have found that enrollment numbers have declined in many program areas, including Instructional Technology. The Push for Integrating Technology in the Content Areas At the same time that enrollments have declined, our university, like many similar educational institutions, is encouraging faculty to embrace the use of instructional technologies in their teaching and create innovative ways to deliver course materials to students. Hiring, tenure, and faculty compensation decisions in recent years have begun to include an examination of how faculty members are using technology in both their teaching and research. In addition, as at many other institutions, the push for faculty to tie technology use to their particular content area is being encouraged across the entire university, in our College of Education and in all of the program areas in our Department of Curriculum and Instruction. We are in the midst of a push toward what Mishra and Koehler (2006) describe as the basis of good teaching with technology, by combining technology expertise, with sound pedagogy and strong content area knowledge. The Emergence of Linked Courses Against this backdrop of declining enrollments and the push for more and better integration of technology, faculty members and administrators in the College of Education at the University of Houston are exploring ways to both attract new students to enroll in graduate courses and to design and deliver more innovative and technology-rich course offerings. One of these approaches we began using is the “linked courses” model. In these linked courses, two faculty members, one from the IT Program and the other from a content area, work together to offer two courses where the content is thematically and pedagogically connected, with a major emphasis on technology tools and resources. Students who enroll in one of the linked courses are required to enroll in the corresponding linked course so that each of the two courses contains the same group of students. The benefits of using this linked course model are many. Graduate students at the University of Houston, who typically work full-time and enroll in courses part-time, are able to gain six hours of credit by taking the linked courses instead of the usual three hours they receive when taking a single graduate course. In addition, students’ skills in the use of instructional technologies are increased when this technology use is tightly integrated with the content knowledge covered in the companion linked course. There are also benefits for the faculty members who teach linked courses, as they are intellectually challenged and inspired by teaching alongside a faculty colleague. Faculty who teach a linked course may choose to either modify an existing course or create a new course not offered before, but in either case, we feel the linkage helps make the content and presentation of course material fresh and interesting to students. Additionally, we have found that that connecting the content area instruction with technology assignments and projects provides a much stronger educational experience for students than when the IT courses are taught as individual stand alone courses. A Shift in Focus for a Digital Photography Course The Educational Uses of Digital Photography and Digital Storytelling is an Instructional Technology graduate course at the University of Houston's College of Education that has been offered since 2004. Over the last few years, the content of the course has gradually moved away from an emphasis on digital cameras and photographic techniques and moved more toward the use of digital images in designing and creating digital stories (Robin & Pierson, 2005). In the course, students learn to use a wide range of digital imaging tools including still image digital cameras, graphic scanners, and various websites that provide access to digital images, such as image search engines from Google and Yahoo. However, the most important shift in the course over the last few years has been to connect the technology of digital imaging and storytelling to content area themes and concepts and the linked course pairing has proved a successful way to do this. The Evolution of Popular Culture and Digital Storytelling We have now offered the Digital Photography and Digital Storytelling course linked with the course on Popular Culture in Education for three years in a row (Robin, 2007; White & Robin, 2008). In the Digital Photography/Storytelling course, students use a popular culture topic as the basis for a digital storytelling project due at the end of the semester. Students create and collect still images, speeches, music, video clips, conduct interviews with content experts, write and re-write scripts, develop storyboards and design and create digital stories based on their popular culture theme. Thus, this linked pair of courses combines the resources of two different program areas in our College of Education and attracts students from both program areas, Instructional Technology and Social Education. The Social Education program area at the University of Houston addresses issues in social studies education, media and cultural studies, and critical pedagogy within a broader context than traditional teacher education. A particular focus is on community collaboration and alternative texts for teaching and learning, all within a critical context advocating more democratic education. All courses have community service and “doing” social education components, and the program area continuously seeks ways to deliver courses through non-traditional approaches, including online, hybrid, and off-campus offerings. Thus, the linking of an IT course and a Social Education course provides a fertile testing ground to design an innovative course offering which will both attract new students and extend the scope of our curriculum. The Popular Culture in Education course is required for graduate students in the soc