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Differing Cultures: Bringing Minds Together
Professional Development for Educators via the Web
Keith A. Hall, Professor
The Ohio State University
College of Education
29 West Woodruff Avenue RA122
Columbus, Ohio USA 43210
hall.25@osu.edu
William Gathergood, Clinical Educator
The Ohio State University
College of Education and Reynoldsburg High School
1579 Huxley Drive
Columbus, Ohio USA 43227
gathergood.1@osu.edu
The culture of the university teacher education professor is different from the culture of the K-12 classroom educator;
the culture of the secondary classroom educator is different from the culture of the elementary classroom educator; the
culture of the urban high school student is different from the culture of the suburban or rural high school student; and
the culture of the American middle school student is different from the culture of the Russian, Japanese, Australian, or
United Kingdom middle school student. Web collaborations among these groups narrow the culture gap and lead to
increased understanding.
A collaboration, started in 1990 and known as the Technology in Education Professional Development School
(TIEPDS), was initiated to bring university teacher education faculty and professional K-12 classroom educators
together to enhance the pre-service preparation of teachers, to facilitate professional development of current classroom
educators, and to conduct inquiry into the preparation and practices of teachers. It has blossomed from a local
collaboration to a composite of national and international collaborations among and between university faculty, K-12
classroom educators, pre-service teachers, university graduate students, and K-12 students.
The programmatic collaborations have evolved from financial investment of the University and Reynoldsburg City
Schools in appointing a K-12 classroom educator as Clinical Educator in the College of Education (with a 50% release
time from his high school teaching responsibilities) and adjusting the responsibilities of a College of Education
professor to serve as co-coordinators of the TIEPDS and to allow for intensive field work in local schools. Although the
co-coordinators are usually able to meet weekly for planning, only one telephone call has taken place between the two in
nearly six years! The majority of the planning, idea development, writing, and creative endeavor has taken place via
e-mail, mailing lists, and FTP--several times per day and frequently seven days per week.
The TIEPDS Forum, a weekly meeting of K-12 educators and university graduate students, has been a major tool to
acclimate the participants to the power of on-line collaboration and encourage its use-- taking us from the comfort of
face-to-face class meetings to meetings of the intellect on the Web and establishing comfort there.
The Co-coordinators of The Ohio State University TIEPDS will extract, synthesize, and collaboratively present findings
from a broad array of TIEPDS projects--not as unique project reports but rather as aggregated findings gathered across
projects which speak to basic constructs of collaboration on the Web.
Literary works have been used as the vehicle for much of the collaborative work which will be reported
here--Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird), The Great Gatsby, and Chekow. And literary
personification--a technique in which teachers and students assume the persona of authors and characters from literature
to help students better understand the significance of literature--has been instrumental in engaging participants in the
lives of the characters and authors. A teacher may become Mark Twain, guiding young students through their first
reading of Huck Finn; students can ask questions of Hamlet while reading the play; or teachers may expand their
horizons as they change their race, gender and ethnic background to fit a role. So an elderly northern male will come to
see To Kill a Mockingbird from the perspective of the author, Harper Lee a young female Southerner, by answering
students' questions via e-mail as Harper Lee.
Leveling the Playing Field: Equality Among Collaborators