TECHNOS

September 8, 2008

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Fall 1992 Vol. 1 No. 3

Christa McAuliffe Educators ‘Touch The Future’

“Christa McAuliffe wanted to view the earth without its political boundaries,” says Misty Brave, one of five 1992 Christa McAuliffe Educators. “Technology allows us to do that.” Brave and her teacher colleagues are leaders in the use of technology to restructure education. They “touch the future,” as McAuliffe once said of her own teaching mission.

The McAuliffe Educators are sponsored by the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education (NFIE), a creation of the National Education Association. The teachers are nominated by others and are chosen through a national search. Named for the teacher who participated in the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle mission of 1986, the Christa McAuliffe Educators plan and conduct the Christa McAuliffe Institute for Educational Pioneering at Stanford University.

Each August the Institute brings together outstanding teachers for training that will help them reach their restructuring goals. In addition to the five Educators, 20 McAuliffe Fellows attend the Institute. The Fellows apply for selection through a national competition. In 1992, the Institute's fifth year, participants were chosen because of their work along the theme of Preparing All Students for the 21st Century: Using Telecommunications to Restructure Education for Global Understanding.

At the 10-day Institute the teachers work on honing organizational skills, collaborating on projects, building teacher networks, recognizing and overcoming barriers to educational change, and learning how to operate within the complexity of school bureaucracies.

Carol Gilkinson, a 1992 McAuliffe Educator and third-grade teacher at Washington School in Covina, California, knows how slowly this grass-roots reform works. “It takes a lot of effort—one person at a time,” she says. To her, telecommunications is the “great equalizer,” the means for cutting through layers of educational bureaucracy so those in the classroom can communicate directly with those making policies in the state houses.

Global education is a high priority for all the 1992 McAuliffe Educators. Marilyn Schlief, a high school teacher of Japanese language and culture in Garden City, Michigan, has established electronic learning links between students and teachers in her school district and those in a partner high school in Shiga, Japan. Using a videophone, Schlief's students and those in Shiga can see and hear each other as they communicate through international lines. “My main interest is in the cultural understanding students gain through the use of new telecommunications technologies,” she says.

It is the need for cultural understanding that motivates Misty Brave, a middle- and high-school environmental sciences teacher at Little Wound School on the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) Pine Ridge Reservation in Kyle, South Dakota. She uses sophisticated technology and multicultural contexts to enhance the curriculum while continuing to stress traditional Indian values. “We are all connected and we must all think of ourselves as a global unit,” she says. “We can do that by sharing information and learning of each other's cultures through technology.”

Bonnie Bracey believes using instructional technology is in itself a step toward restructuring. Her fourth- and fifth-grade students at Ashlawn Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia, use a variety of hardware and software applications and frequently participate in the National Geographic Society's HELLO Network and other on-line links. They use telecommunications to participate in international research projects on challenging global issues. “The kids get really excited when they're using on-line telecommunications,” Bracey says. “They're thinking, learning, making changes in their work, and using higher-level thinking skills.”

After the Institute, the Educators continue to share their enthusiasm and leadership with other teachers by attending state and national conferences, serving on committees and boards, and hosting a national teleconference October 22 on PBS. They become NFIE's ambassadors for using technology to enhance global education.

“That,” says McAuliffe Educator James Zimmerman, fifth-grade teacher at Thomas Paine Elementary School in Urbana, Illinois, “is something that won't end when this year is over. I think that's going to be a part of who I am and what my curriculum is from now on.”

—Melinda Grewar

For more information about the Christa McAuliffe Institute for Educational Pioneering, contact Institute Director David Wallace at NFIE, 1201 Sixteenth Street NW, Washington, DC 20036; telephone (202) 822-7840.

Return to Slow Boat to Reform TECHNOS Quarterly article.