BOX 9.6
Monsters, Mondrian, and Me
As part of the Challenge 2000 Multimedia Project, elementary teachers
Lucinda Surber, Cathy Chowenhill, and Page McDonald teamed up to design
and execute an extended collaboration between fourth-grade classes at
two elementary schools. In a unit they called "Monsters, Mondrian, and
Me," students were directed to describe a picture so well in an e-mail
message that their counterparts in the other classroom could reproduce
it. The project illustrates how telecommunication can both make clear
the need for clear, precise writing and provide a forum for feedback
from peers.
During the Monster
phase of the project, students in the two classes worked in pairs first
to invent and draw monsters (such as "Voyager 999," "Fat Belly," and
"Bug Eyes") and then to compose paragraphs describing the content of
their drawings (e.g., "Under his body he has four purple legs with three
toes on each one"). Their goal was to provide a complete and clear
enough description that students in the other class could reproduce the
monster without ever having seen it. The descriptive paragraphs were
exchanged through electronic mail, and the matched student pairs made
drawings based on their understanding of the descriptions.
The final step of this
phase involved the exchange of the "second-generation drawings" so that
the students who had composed the descriptive paragraphs could reflect
on their writing, seeing where ambiguity or incomplete specification led
to a different interpretation on the part of their readers.
The students executed
the same steps of writing, exchange of paragraphs, drawing, and
reflection, in the Mondrian stage, this time starting with the art of
abstract expressionists such as Mondrian, Klee, and Rothko. In the Me
stage, students studied self-portraits of famous painters and then
produced portraits of themselves, which they attempted to describe with
enough detail so that their distant partners could produce portraits
matching their own.
By giving students a
distant audience for their writing (their partners at the other school),
the project made it necessary for students to say everything in writing,
without the gestures and oral communication that could supplement
written messages within their own classroom. The pictures that their
partners created on the basis of their written descriptions gave these
young authors tangible feedback regarding the completeness and clarity
of their writing.
The students'
reflections revealed developing insights into the multiple potential
sources for miscommunication:
Maybe you skipped over another part, or maybe it was too hard to
understand.
The only thing that made it not exactly perfect was our mistake. . .
. . We said, "Each square is down a bit, " What we should have said
was, "Each square is all the way inside the one before it, " or
something like that.
I think I could have been more clear on the mouth. I should have
said that it was closed. I described it [as if it were] open by telling
you I had no braces or retainers.
The electronic
technologies that students used in this project were quite simple (word
processors, e-mail, scanners). The project's sophistication lies more
in its structure, which required students to focus on issues of audience
understanding and to make translations across different media (words and
pictures), potentially increasing their understanding of the strengths
and weaknesses of each.
The students' artwork,
descriptive paragraphs, and reflections are available on a project
website at http://www.pausd.palo-alto.ca.us/barron/mmm/mmm.html.