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William Peet, Ph.D.
Article published in Proceedings of the Sixth Annual
International Conference:
"Technology and Persons with Disabilities," Center on
Disabilities,
California State University, Northridge March, 1991
What Does It Mean?
Interest-driven learning means learning to do something
because you need it in order to do what you want to do. It's
that simple. It means learning to read because you love to
discover new things through your reading, or solve problems
that are important to you that require you to read for
information, or from creating your own mental pictures of a
fantasy world which especially intrigues you. It means
learning to write because you need to write if you want to
share your ideas, hopes, dreams with someone who matters to
you who is far away. It means learning - creating - your own
unique problem-solving strategies because you want to do
something that is not just straightforward and simple.
The Best Example
The classic example of interest-driven learning is teaching
yourself as a baby to speak the language of the people who
take care of you, to assure you will be able to request food,
love, and assistance in doing things you want to do (like
finding out everything there is to know about everything)
Simple Concept, Yet Complicated to Put into Practice
It's that simple...and that complicated - at least it's
complicated for a great teacher to make it happen in a school
setting, with just the one teacher and 30 students - all of
whom need varying amounts of personal attention. So this is -
and has always been - the quandary of dedicated educators: how
to make that natural learning process take place under their
nurturance, for as many of their students as possible.
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Education Now Too Much a Normalizing
Process - Here's an Alternative
A major problem, however, is that education has become much
too much a normalizing process, with a scope and sequence of
activities that is designed to "get across" basic skills that
could be created by students under their own power. If the
teacher could just guide each student to engage in a series of
personally-relevant, interest-driving activities - in place of
the restrictive, boring and often irrelevant structured series
of lessons that is suggested or required by the school systems
where the teachers work, students would create their own
knowledge - or, better yet, they would create their own
knowledge-generating and personal productivity systems:
reading, writing, 'rithmatic, algebra, geometry, etc., all
focused at the center of their individual life needs, all
empowering them to do things they need to / want to / feel
they must do.
Why should childhood be a time to be pumped full of knowledge
about things that are deemed important by adults, with the
times and places for this learning likewise determined by
adults. Much, much more is always learned when the learner is
seeking to answer her own questions, solve his own problems,
create her own literary masterpieces, write his thoughts down
to be shared with others not present in the same space or
time, write her own songs, compose his own poetry, impress her
peers with her knowledge and expertise in an arena of value to
the peer culture, etc.
It is my contention, as yet only preliminarily
proven in a school arena, that all of the subjects we consider
"required" curriculum arenas will be learned by every child
who is given total support in the entrepreneurial
investigation of her interests, and encouragement to explore
all avenues of intersection of psychology, history, politics,
economics, geography, mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc.
with his interests.
The Business of Teachers
Teachers would be in the challenging new business of talking
with and listening to students, to discover their arenas of
interest and strength. From this dialogue, teachers would keep
an ongoing tab on crucial interest and strength information
about each student. Using that knowledge base, teachers would
suggest and support activities such as letter writing, book
writing, illustrating and publishing, development of
entrepreneurial business plans, play writing, songwriting,
research on areas of interest aimed toward sharing expert
knowledge with others of similar interests. Note that these
types of student activities parallel all the things committed,
engaged adults do when they strive to master a field, perform
services within that field, and share the results of their
efforts with those who will benefit from their expertise.
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A typical school day for a teacher working in
such a classroom will consist of conferencing with
individuals, pairs and groups of students working on projects
of their own choosing within a world of exploration and
productivity the teacher has created for them. The teacher
will be a reference point for children eagerly engaged in
seeking information, writing, performing, speaking publicly
about skateboarding, geology of continental plate fault lines,
the history of Barbie dolls, rock music's beginnings in the
50s...whatever grabs them. Teacher must of course prime the
pump at first, but eventually, children operating in such an
exciting learning environment will become to a great extent
self starters. Teachers will continue to offer presentations,
chosen on the basis of perceived student interests, but
children will not be required to attend any presentation, as
long as they are occupied on a project that is more
interesting to them. That will be the one requirement: that
each child at all times be involved in some project, solo or
in a group, that involves somehow an eventual product to be
shared with someone else. The wonderful thing for teachers of
the '90s is that school-based microcomputers allow much more
of these types of activities to actually take place in
classrooms - mostly because of word processing, databases, and
well-crafted simulation software packages. Video media are
also extremely helpful (at least one class camcorder, for
example), since students could always have the option to view
presentations later if their current work kept them engaged
and they found out later they wished they had attended a
presentation that received
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rave reviews from others. An ideal arena for
"image literacy" is the intersection of computer and video,
where the computer terminal is interfaced with the video
playback medium (either tape cassette or disk) so that the
students can include their own video production images in
their computer-based products. The HyperCard and LinkWay
software arenas on the Macintosh and IBM computers,
respectively, give their users control over this type of image
writing, with only a very short time commitment required to
learn to create presentations. Of course, this is all
predicated on the availability of computers, appropriate
software and video media.
Differences in Outcomes and Process: Curriculum vs.
Interest-Driven Learning.
The major difference between interest-driven learning and
traditional curriculum-driven learning is that the learner is
central, rather than the subject matter. The subject matter -
whether reading, writing, mathematics, history, physics, or
whatever - is still mastered by the learner, but because it is
a path toward a personal goal, not because it is a required
course at school.
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But in order for such a learner-centered
approach to work, teachers must have both solid
self-confidence in their ability to be flexible leaders in the
students' search for knowledge and creative avenues for
self-expression, a definite sense that what they're up to -
creating an unending sequence of interest-driven learning
arenas for their students - will work, and access to enormous
amounts of information and considerable support in their
efforts, from other colleagues (especially administration), as
well as from technology.
Since they no longer have the comfort of a textbook, with its
required readings, sequence, and exercises, and since the
arenas for learning and productivity are expanded to include
everything that might be interesting to the learners, the
teachers must be quite comfortable with all of the tools they
will need to offer to their students: word processing,
data-base construction, image-processing (involving the lowest
levels of computer programming, to control where and when the
images appear in a presentation), and access to major data
sources. This latter is possibly the most important. The
teacher in the interest-driven learning classroom must spend
her/his "textbook" budget on magazines, books, and print/video
data-base searches that will provide each of the learners with
access
to information in their interest arenas.
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So, Is This All Viable Now?
Is it really possible that such an approach to public
education is currently viable?
Obviously the ideal situation is still very much a dream in
too many public schools, but armed with the basic concept of
interest-driven learning - that students will learn basic
content or process skills best if they need those skills to do
something they very much want to do - every teacher can begin
to make at least some interest-driven learning available to
students. For one thing, there is such a thing as child
culture. With a minimal knowledge of what matters most in
child culture, a dedicated teacher can push the presentations,
the arenas offered for learning efforts, in the direction that
will interest a great majority of the students. Allowing,
rather encouraging learners to read, research, write, and
share with others about skateboarding and Barbie Dolls will
produce far better results, far more dedicated students than
forcing them to read, write, and share with others about less
interesting topics, even if they are readily available with
all supporting materials, criterion-referenced testing, etc.
Avoiding the trap of the nicely packaged scope and sequence
curriculum is the first step toward a liberated
interest-driven learning process.
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Appendix: Examples of Interest Driven
Learning
The following are a number of examples of environments we have
created for interest-driven learning in school and clinical
settings.
"Teacher, Can I Stay In During Recess?":The Amazing Power
of Interactive Fiction
In the spring of 1986, at King Intermediate School in Hawai'i,
we gave four seventh grade classes the chance to work through
Mystery at Pinecrest Manor. First we introduced the hard words
(Archaeologist, Egyptian, etc.) in a pre-adventuring session,
then we sent the kids to the computers in four person
adventuring groups: one reader, one keyboarder, one recorder
for clues gathered as the group investigates all around good
old Pinecrest Manor, and one recorder for incriminating
evidence gathered from each of the suspects. (It turns out
even Uncle Ralph could have been the one! He had a heck of a
lot of insurance on his priceless Egyptian statue, stolen
during the night.)
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The kids just had a ball. One boy asked his
teacher if it was okay to stay in during recess to continue
working on the program - this from a rough kid who hated
school. Even when several groups solved the mystery, the
others were so motivated that they kept on reading,
discussing, writing clues, and generally sleuthing until they
came to their own conclusion, and could tell the program not
just who the culprit was, but where the statue was hidden.
After all groups had finished, about the fourth or fifth
language arts class in the adventuring unit, we got everybody
together and brainstormed our way through the adventure,
discussing first the introductory situation, with a review of
all the characters and lots of adjectives describing each
character, then the plot, and finally the resolution. That
took a full period, and the master teacher wrote all of the
kids contributions on flip charts. The second review session,
we took them through an outlining process, boiling all their
words down to a neat outline. In pairs, the kids went to the
computers and created outlines, using old Bank Street Writer.
They were very proud of their printouts, their first
word-processed products, nicely printed out by the printer - a
clean written product! We had them make one copy for each
partner, and it should be mentioned here that one of the
important aspects of the success of this unit was the
availability of five computers and two printers, with no class
larger than ten or eleven children - they all had a chance to
write, in turns, right after the brainstorm on the outline.
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Our next step was another brainstorm - outline
sequence, but this time, we had the pairs create their own
mysteries. Some came up with "Miami Vice" type adventures,
some with more personal ghost stories, but each pair created
their own product. I believe this was an extremely important
part of the entire unit: to be able to use the computer, which
had for the first time in their lives given them the chance to
have fun during a reading lesson, as a tool to produce a
creative writing product!
One of my colleagues, state special education computer
resource teacher for our department of education, Marcia
Jenkins, has worked with the King Intermediate special
education department since our initial reading-writing unit to
put the kids in contact with other kids across the state and
the country with her "Hawai'iKids" project on SpecialNet. The
children have been able to continue and expand their reading
and writing horizons, in classic interest-driven learning
experiences, using the written language for their own
purposes: to communicate with electronic pen pals.
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The last I heard, over 50% of the children in
our original group were out of special ed language arts
classes, doing very nicely back in the mainstream. The only
problem, which I heard from one of my students teaching in the
high school fed by King Intermediate, is that the King kids
were frustrated at the lack of sufficient computer time in
their new regular ed classes! It looks like we have a big job
ahead of us! All of our students, special ed, ESL, regular ed,
deserve to have the delightful new reading
curriculum offered by good interactive fiction!!!
Some Not-So-Clinical Case Studies: Carefully-Presented
Computer Tools Change Lives
After working with children and adults with disabilities for
six and a half years now, trying out my ideas of matching
interest-driving computer software and hardware and
peripherals with people who need them, I have seen some
remarkable things.
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Word Processing Liberates 29-Year-Old
I have seen a 29 year old woman (now 34), who told me the
other children used to throw orange peels at her and call her
"dummy," find herself as a member of the adult world of work
through her efforts to master business word processing. This
woman is now holding down a regular clerical job, "with
benefits too!", as she recently confided to me proudly. This
woman tests at 65 on "IQ" measures, and was given little hope
that she would ever really be normal by a school system that
labeled her "special ed." But somewhere inside her she never
gave up, and when she discovered she could do this word
processing stuff better than most, it was like the sun coming
out of a cloud. At last she could do something worthwhile,
that society valued. Her life was changed.
Turned On to Writing by a Talking Robot
I have seen a 17-year-old boy, a special education student
throughout his school career because of his marginal autism,
discover a computer program that would say anything he typed,
and all of a sudden, he had a reason to write! He brought with
him to our second workshop a list of 87 words and phrases he
had laboriously written (in a scrawl only he could
read...well, maybe his mom, too), which he wanted to hear the
robot voice in the computer say for him. His mom told me she
had never seen him spontaneously write anything of this
magnitude ever before.
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I lost track of this student for about four
years, then started working with him once weekly about a year
and a half ago. After browsing most of the talking word
processors I had access to on the Apple II, using them to
write letters to people he wanted to communicate with or
needed information from, he has graduated to regular,
non-talking word processors. He uses GeoWrite on his two
Commodore 64 computers (one at his group home and one at his
mom's place) and is becoming an expert on MacWrite at our
Aloha Special Technology Access Center (our Hawaii affiliate
in the National Special Education Alliance. Next week he and I
and Steve, one of our consumer members of the Aloha STAC board
of directors (this guy is another life changer - he discovered
the Apple before me, and word processes at 20 words per minute
despite his severe cerebral palsy) are going to work out the
design for a promotional flyer and admission ticket we plan to
use in our upcoming fund-raiser at Studebakers, a local disco.
Steve is a 50s and 60s rock and roll expert, and he plans to
provide unique cuts from his personal collection of 45s for
our fundraiser revelers to lindy and bop to.
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Babies On Task for Over One Hour
I have seen very young children with severe physical,
cognitive and speech disabilities brighten up and interact
with caregivers for 60 to 70 minutes non-stop via properly
chosen interest-driven communication software. All we had to
do was give L. (a two year old with cerebral palsy and little,
if any, recognizable speech) a chance to ask for play and
music outcomes by pressing the switch with Jean Kiyabu's and
Cheryl Fong's Tot Lingo program. L. would press the switch
when the picture of a child rolling a ball appeared on the
screen, the computer would say "Roll ball." for her, and
Cheryl would roll the ball across L's tray. They rolled,
caught, bounced and threw the ball back and forth for about 20
minutes before L gave signs of boredom and Cheryl switched the
theme to bubbles. They then blew bubbles, popped bubbles,
caught bubbles, and got many more bubbles (the four choices in
the bubbles theme) for another 20 minutes. They were both
starting to get a little tired when they got to the music
theme, where L could choose to ask me to play "The People on
the Bus, Rock-a-Bye, Twinkle Twinkle, or Peek-a-Boo" on my
guitar. L and Cheryl sort of bopped til they dropped, so to
speak. It was hard to tell who was more exhausted after 75
minutes, but it was a good kind of exhaustion.
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Child With Profound Disability Talks With
Aid of Computer
Another child, not so young in years, but all but given up for
a goner at school (placed as severely multiply disabled and
profoundly cognitively challenged - very young in cognitive
age), just lit up like a candle one day while I was messing
around with some single switch music software. D happened to
be in the room while her mother was working next door. She
likes having the TV as company, but it does get a bit boring
lying there on the floor. I noticed D looking up, lifting
herself with all her might (a great effort, due to her
physical disability). She was most interested in the sounds of
music coming out of the computer as I pushed the switch. Ruth
Akiona, president and executive director of our Aloha Special
Technology Access Center (National Special Education Alliance
affiliate in Honolulu), decided she'd go out and get D's
father, who was working nearby, and see what would happen. We
put D on dad's lap, positioned the switch so she could reach
it easily, and showed her that she could get the computer (and
all of us too, of course) to sing for her just by pressing the
switch.
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She just had a ball, of course! Her favorite
song was "If You're Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands." We
all sang along after she pressed the switch, her dad helped
her clap her hands, and she smiled broadly - the first really
radiant smile I had seen on her face. The second time through
the songs, D started laughing with great gusto as we reached
"If You're Happy." The third time, she actually initiated the
hand clapping movements in anticipation of her favorite.
Well, we figured she needed to be able to tell us what she
wanted to play with or sing with more direct control. So we
tried Tot Lingo (TL, hereafter, a public domain program by
Jean Kiyabu and Cheryl Fong). So we tried the songs theme from
TL. She absolutely loved the "Peek-a-Boo!" So we left the
"Peek" picture on the screen for about 10 minutes so she could
ask us over and over again for her favorite TL song. D really
enjoyed being able to ask for the ball to be rolled to her, or
bounced, etc., so we have been careful to offer her that ball
theme each time we have a session with her. We have since
shown the whole family how to use the program, and they are on
their way to synthesizing a language for D to use to
communicate her needs and interests, with the help of the
computer, the speech synthesizer and the proper program - in
this case, at least to begin with, Tot Lingo.
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