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Multimedia and Westward Expansion - ST Week 2.3

Happy Thursday! As the first week of my student teaching semester comes to a close, I thought I would take some time to reflect on the introductory lessons to our Westward Expansion unit. Although most of today’s class time was absorbed by Vermont’s STAR reading exam (I will post my thoughts on the STAR as I learn more about it in the coming days), students had an opportunity to continue their westward expansion work during whatever class time remained after they turned in their exams. By tomorrow (Friday, 1/10), students are expected to have completed the work for the three introductory lessons reviewed earlier this week. From my observations, most students appear to be on track for tomorrow’s due date, but only time will tell! For now, I’d like to focus on the multiple forms of media employed in these opening lessons, and I will note some major points of consideration that I am still pondering after four days of learning.

The introductory lessons for the Westward Expansion unit are similar in structure to many of Mr. J’s lesson materials: all necessary worksheets and sources are available in our humanities Google Classroom, and any additional materials not easily manipulated on a computer (for example, mapping activities) are printed and distributed to students. Over the course of three days, Team Nova students have started to learn about the United States’s means for fulfilling its ultimate goal of manifest destiny in multiple ways. Beyond the basic textbook readings with questions, students have learned about life on the frontier from images contemporary to our expansion era, clips from PBS’s Frontier House (you can check those out here, it’s wild to watch), mapping activities that ask students to consider geography’s impact on migration, and some brief readings that highlight character grit and morality in a way that provokes students to question the U.S. government’s actions on their quest to acquire more land for the country. Thought-provoking in topic while also engaging in its delivery, the multimedia approach to learning about life on the frontier has Team Nova eighth graders far more interested in westward expansion than I ever recall being as a U.S. history student.

Propaganda in favor of Westward Expansion
Source: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--GKdbQBfc--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/18rwoksyai2p3jpg.jpg


Countless education courses at Saint Michael’s College emphasize the importance of differentiation, engagement, and accommodation when teaching future educators about lesson planning and implementation. One of my favorite ways to tackle all three concepts is through the use of multimedia in content delivery, particularly media that can later be referenced by students when completing summative assessments. Finding multiple forms of media that center around the same lesson objectives, specific content, and/or overarching themes within the unit allows students to access the unit’s essential components in a way that best suits their current interests and learning abilities. While the introductory lessons to westward expansion offer little choice beyond the order in which each lesson’s tasks are completed, the media used to engage students with the unit content supports student learning and interests by capitalizing on several different learning strengths (visualization, auditory learning, reading, logical reasoning, moral reasoning, etc.). Adding another level of student choice in the lessons would certainly make the lesson plans stronger and more beneficial for students from a progressive teaching standpoint, but overall, I have found that my students are accessing the unit material in a way that does not sacrifice their interests or learning preferences thus far. 

As a future educator that best aligns with Dewey’s views on progressive education, I am excited to continue observing students during the Westward Expansion unit as we shift our focus from visual media to journal entries from the frontier. Purposefully planned to captivate all learners from the beginning, Mr. J’s multimedia approach to westward expansion branches out far beyond visual media, promising students a chance to engage with their own thoughts about expansion through a journaling and wagon design project meant to pull from the experiences portrayed by the contemporary media students analyze. Keeping my future career as an educator in mind, I am looking forward to observing the (hopefully) successful implementation of a unit incorporating multiple forms of media, especially since planning these types of lessons often fall into the “ideal in theory, difficult in practice” troupe.

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