Building Cultural Sensitivity Through Classroom Technology
When I was a young kid, education was had little more appeal to me than the black and white text and the superficial, smiling faces of the cartoon illustrations in my Maths text book smiling back at me. The truth is, everything that I ever studied in a text book, regardless of the context of the subject being taught, never seemed to have any real world application (with the exception of modern history, of course).
As a student, one thing I appealed for was a little dose of reality. Something I could take out of my logic-building subjects and apply within a real world context, and shape a macro-conscious understanding of the world that we are all born into. It may seem a little strange that I think this way, but I know I’m not the only one out there. Throughout life’s journey, we begin to meet a lot of different people, from different countries, with different backgrounds, ideals and opinions. For example, upon my most recent trip to America, I shared a cab with a middle-aged man from Florida, in the sunny South. When I told him from Australia, after setting aside the quizzical and humorous trivialities, he proceeded to ask me about our culture. One thing that got my attention was, “Hey, don’t you guys still have cannibals to the north or something like that?” I did nothing but stare back in astonishment at what I had just heard. I sat there thinking,”is this guy for real?” but as it turns out, he was. Anyway, after settling a gross misconception about the cultures residing in Australia, it made me think, what do they really teach people in schools? I mean, I for one, was brought up to believe that people in the deep south of America were all ‘rednecks’. After seeing it myself however, I then realized the folly of my original assumption. In fact, I felt stupid. The people in the deep south of America were lovely, their hospitality amazing, their personalities humble and unassuming. It made me think hard to myself, was I at fault, or was it because my school had never instilled me with a little bit of cultural sensitivity. It must not be misconstrued that I am inferring to race, because I’m not, I’m just illustrating the point that at my school in Australia, we were never really given any true insight into the surrounding cultures of the world because we never had the resources. I reckon, with a little dose of reality, my subjects could have had a more gravitational impact on me by keeping me engaged via a real-world contextual adaptation of the subject matter. After trawling the web recently out of part curiosity and the other part boredom, I came across this little gem: the interactive whiteboard. If you’re not familiar with the technology, a fair summary of its function and purpose is that it is an interactive touch panel, with the ability to run interactive ‘lessons’ in which the student can use their sense of touch to navigate, have fun and most of all, learn. So, how does this type of technology illustrate my above point? Well, I came across this unique yet bizarre application of interactive whiteboard technology. An interactive whiteboard lesson, mathematics, to be exact, introducing young students to pictures of the real world around them - parts of which, they may never have known even in their wildest dreams! Not only are students building upon powerful, essential mathematical logic, but they are also tacitly learning about the housing situation in Mozambique, the types of brick houses that they have in Uganda, and the types of communities in South Africa. The children engaging with this marvelous technology are subconsciously adopting a sense of cultural sensitivity at a young age via the impactful medium of touch-sensitive information technology. So what does this mean? Well, aside from the obvious value of children being able to engage with their subject matter, it also brings about the destruction of trans-continental apathy. When they see similar images on the news, the pictures that they see will already tell 1000 words because they’ve established a geographical and cultural understanding of their surrounds. Man, did I ever wish I could have been introduced to that type of thing as a kid! What are your thoughts? Do you see the integration of cultural learning into mainstream subjects via technology beneficial for the development of values in schools? Or do you see this type of learning combination as an impediment on traditional educational methods?
