| This study focused on the need for an increased understanding of the experiences of preservice elementary educators and their respective abilities to define culture, identity, and the politics of representation in a technologically centered world by responding to culturally challenging and politically laden images and media. The experience under study focused on pre-service elementary educators enrolled in an arts methods class and understanding their abilities to perceive, process, and respond to visual media on a blog. Throughout this process, I assessed the individual's understanding of multicultural concerns as it related to the Internet, museum, and online discussions, with implications for teaching and learning in art and museum education. I utilized Anderson and Milbrandt's (2005) analytic critical model with Banks. (1991) value-inquiry model in order to assess students' abilities to critically analyze challenging material while investigating blogging and asynchronous methods of communication as a strategy for addressing these issues.; In this study, I reveal how students negotiated, shared, and constructed multiple aspects of their identities in order to understand their roles in addressing diversity in their future classrooms. Students completed a curriculum designed to help them describe, analyze, interpret, and judge material that highlights aspects of their classmates' cultural identities. Students first created a personal blog that revealed their cultural identity, posted and responded to a classroom communal blog that reflected material that challenged an aspect of their cultural identity, and then responded to online surveys that revealed various aspects of their cultural identity while reflecting on the meanings they generated throughout this study. What I found was that students developed a greater awareness of their personal value systems as a student, friend, and/or family member. They focused on the beliefs they thought they needed in order to address culturally challenging material in their future classrooms. This study also helped students understand the process of transformation: where they came from, where they are presently, and how they see their beliefs impacting the type of learning environment they will create for their students in the future.; Finally, I share the implications of using blogging in the classroom as a counter-hegemonic tool of inquiry, a way to connect the worlds of art, museum, and multicultural education, and a means of revealing the personal stories of students in a way to create an open and expressive environment for addressing challenging material. |
