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Concluding Remarks
Engaging preservice teachers in digital video editing as described above enables us to discuss the teaching of science in much more substantive ways. Focusing on how children make sense of the world and how adults make sense of daily instruction, specifically with regard to misconceptions in science, helps me address preservice teachers' beliefs about science teaching and National Science Standards (National Research Council, 1996).
Prospective teachers learn to identify more clearly the characteristics of inquiry-based lessons in their lesson critiques, article reviews, and peer-lesson evaluations. They begin to write more articulate journal entries about teaching dilemmas and children's thinking. More teachers become able to identify the real struggles surrounding the question of how to teach less content for greater understanding, and they express these revelations in journals that address misconceptions and difficult decisions about cutting certain content.
Some of the obstacles I face in getting students hands-on experiences with iMovie include inconsistent access to laptops and digital video cameras at poorly supported schools. The teacher education program at San Diego State is committed to providing authentic teaching contexts for our students, but conducting science-methods courses in the field at sites with little technology severely hampers our abilities to teach them about science teaching or technology. In addition, some teachers at the schools affiliated with our site-based program are not open to alternative interpretations of science and want to teach only text-driven vocabulary. While the iMovies can model alternative strategies in order to offset this narrow-mindedness, the socialization of student teachers is strong and the impact of the course may be undone in subsequent weeks or months.
Like any educational technology, desktop video editing cannot respond to all of the challenges that teachers face in today's classroom. However, for my preservice teachers, the use of desktop video has encouraged individual expression, spawned creativity, revitalized content, promoted collective knowledge construction and individual reflection, and enabled them to engage in authentic learning. Digital video editing need not be confined to science teaching alone. Several practicing elementary teachers with whom we have been working have also found ways to enhance their children's writing, speaking, and research skills through such activities as coordinating school-site news teams, assigning book reports in video format, and capturing virtual field trips. Digital video editing provides a venue for children and teachers to gain a deeper and broader representation of what it means to understand content and to assess content instruction.
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