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PROJECT OVERVIEW


Who is conducting the research?

The principal researcher and coordinator of the project is Elizabeth Barkley. Joining her in the later phases of the research has been a "faculty team" comprised of teacher partners who contribute their own point-of-view, expertise and insight. Supplementing quantitative analysis of student characteristics over a 6 year trend are current "Student Investigators" who have been identified through controlled random selection. These "Student Investigators" function as representatives who help provide more in-depth data on the teaching and learning in this course.
Elizabeth Barkley: Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and has been both an administrator and a music faculty member at Foothill College, where she has worked for 23 years. She was named California's 1998 Higher Education Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation. She was also selected as "Innovator of the Year" by the Footill-De Anza Community College District in conjunction with the National League for Innovation in the Community College. Additionally, she was awarded the Hayward Award for Educational Excellence in 1999 by the California Community Colleges, the 1999 "Faculty Excellence Diversity Award" by the Center for Diversity in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, and the 1999 "President's Special Achievement Award" at Foothill College.
Robert Hartwell: Robert Hartwell is a composer, author and musicologist. He taught piano in the community for twenty years before joining the faculty at Foothill College where he teaches classes in music history and piano performance as well as Music in Multicultural America. He has written articles on such diverse topics as Renaissance vocal music and the role of popular music in piano pedagogy. Professor Hartwell was recently recognized by the San Jose Mercury for his excellence in teaching and by the American Pen Women for his efforts in composition. He lectures frequently in the Bay Area, and is one of the pre-performance lecturers for the San Francisco Opera.
Toru Iiyoshi: Toru was born in Tokyo, Japan and once immersed himself in playing keyboards and drums in a "non-profit" techno-pop band. Currently, he serves as Senior Scholar responsible for the Knowledge Media Laboratory of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He is an educational technologist and holds a Ph.D. in instructional systems from the Florida State University. Iiyoshi has directed several research and development projects emphasising the innovative educational application of emerging technologies both in the U.S. and Japan. He provided design and technical guidance throughout the development process of this online course portfolio.
Mike Sult: Mike received BA and MA degrees from San Jose State University and has been an instructor at Foothill since 1981, teaching music courses including Jazz Improvisation, Classical/Folk/Rock/Jazz Guitar, Electronic music, Music Theory, and Jazz/Rock/Pop History. He has performed throughout the Bay Area for the last 25 years in various groups (or solo) in a variety of styles including Classical, Jazz, Rock and Pop. In addition to his involvement in music, Sult is a certified Java programmer also experienced in the C and C++ computer languages.
Baomi Bhutts: Baomi is a musician who sings Gospel, Spirituals and jazz. She has toured Canada and Europe with Harry Belafonte, and performed solo in such countries as West Africa, Denmark, Japan and Sweden. She is also an actress who has performed with San Francisco's American Conservatory Theatre (ACT), American Musical Theatre of San Jose, San Jose Repertory Theatre, Lorraine Hansberry Theater, and Off-Broadway in New York. She has been on the faculty in the California State University system for 10 years teaching a wide range of courses such as World Music Choir, History of African American Music and Jazz in America, Jazz/Improv Vocal Ensemble. She is also the Director of the Foothill College Gospel Choir.
Debika Pal: Debika was born, raised, and educated in Bombay, India until she came to the U.S. at the age of 15. She is currently a Foothill College Honor Scholar who not only dedicates herself to academics, but who is also an active participant in working for the community. She has held leadership positions in the Alpha Gamma Sigma Honor Society Club and in Student Government. She will transfer to UC Berkeley in Fall of 2000 as a Political Science major. Her plan is to run a television talk show in India solely dedicated to political discussions and interviewing politicians. She intends to use her education and skills to fight corruption and sexism in her country.
Paul Aguilar: Paul collected many of the visual materials in this portfolio. He is a film producer and multimedia presenter on Native American history, music and issues. He is a Mayan Indian and has been connected with the local Indian community for 20 years. He has lived in several areas of the United States and has become knowledgeable about various Indian nations. He is a musician, film producer and director with American Indian documentaries and short narratives.


What is the research question?

For several years, enrollment in our general education music course had been declining. Music is central to the lives of today's young students, so why was enrollment declining? Five years ago I had a hypothesis that two of the most important contributors to the decline were course content and delivery.

Content: the existing course was based on Western European "classical" music. Although this curriculum remains the higher education standard, it does not adequately address the interests, needs, or cultures of contemporary students who have come of age in an increasingly diverse, multicultural society.

Delivery: today's "digital generation" students have spent their lives surrounded by electronic media and learning through participation and experience. The existing course had been taught in the sequential, passive, and pyramidal approach of traditional higher-ed curriculum.

If my hypothesis was correct, it meant that the existing course needed to be transformed into an entirely new course. My research question, then, became:

"How can I transform the existing course into a course that a) better attracts and retains students and, b) fosters deeper and more enduring understanding because it better engages today's students in terms of more relevant content and more appropriate delivery."

This web site documents my work answering that question


Where was the research done?

Located in the heart of Silicon Valley in California, the Foothill College campus has won numerous architectural design awards and is cited by the San Francisco Chronicle as the "most beautiful community college every built." In 1994, Foothill College was the first California community college to offer instruction online via the Internet. Foothill strives to maintain a record of academic excellence and innovation and to that end, faculty and staff continually examine what they do and how they do it to make programs and services better serve the needs of students. It is in the spirit of this examination that this course portfolio which analyzes Music of Multicultural America was undertaken.

When was the research done?

This course portfolio was created during the 1999-2000 academic year as part of Elizabeth Barkley's work as a member of the 1999 class of Carnegie Scholars. It builds upon her work as a college music professor and her puzzling over course problems as early as 1994. Additionally, the course portfolio will continue beyond the 1999-2000 academic year as she continues to enrich it with new research questions, evidence and analysis in subsequent generations of the course.

Summary on Line Graph

Academic Year, 1994-95: Puzzling Over Conventional Course Problems
Summer 1995: Participation in UC Berkeley's Seminar on American Cultures
Academic Year 1995-96 Course Modified for Content
Academic Year 1996-97: Course Modified for Pedagogy
1997-98: Course Modified for Web Delivery
1998-99: Course Modified for "Blended Delivery"
1999-2000: Research on Course Transformation

Why is the research and evidence important?

Today's classrooms frequently contain students with extraordinarily diverse backgrounds in everything from age, socio-economic level, race and ethnicity to primary language and academic preparedness. This diversity presents significant teaching challenges. Furthermore, today's "digital generation" students have spent their lives surrounded by electronic media and learning through participation and experience. This presents a problem to those of us raised in (and continuing to teach in) the sequential, passive, and pyramidal approach of traditional higher-ed curriculum. If teachers are going to be effective, they must learn strategies to meet the needs of this new and different cohort of students. This course portfolio attempts to identify ways to address these issues.

How was the research conducted?

The research was conducted using a multilayered, multimedia hypertext electronic course portfolio. The course portfolio is a relatively recent contribution to research design for the scholarship of teaching and learning. According to Pat Hutchings, course portfolios help faculty "investigate and document what they know and do as teachers in ways that will contribute to more powerful student learning." They are still in the process of invention, but Lee Shulman has proposed four different formats that can serve as frameworks:

Anatomical in which the researcher asks how the individual course elements such as tests, lectures, projects fit together to form the larger, working system;

Natural History in which the researcher analyzes how the course unfolds or evolves, either within itself or across multiple generations of the same course;

Ecological in which the researcher explores how the course fits within the larger curricular programmatic context; and

Investigation in which, for example, the researcher might develop hypotheses, create interventions, and then analyze the course for the efficacy of those interventions.

My course portfolio contains elements of all four frameworks. It looks at the structure of the course's content, delivery, and assessment (anatomical); analyzes the evolution of the course from the baseline to its transformed versions (historical); explores how the transformed course fits within the general education curricular pattern (ecological); and explores the efficacy of a series of interventions drawn from the two overarching hypotheses (investigation). It is an example of a new version of the course portfolio in that it attempts to utilize the distinct characteristics of the world wide web such as multimedia, interactivity, and hyperlinks.

How does the research represent "The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?"

Research related to learning and the assessment of learning has received considerable attention over the last decade. Many higher education faculty want to improve their teaching and would happily build upon the work of Boyer (1990) and Glassic, Huber and Maeroff (1997) who seek to foster a conception of teaching as scholarly work. This conception requires that teaching be public, subject to critical evaluation and usable by others in both the scholarly and general community.

Public: The work has been documented as a web-based course portfolio that is posted and available on the Carnegie Knowledge Media Lab.

Critical Evaluation: The portfolio is available for evaluation; there are specific locations within the site that have been created for feedback; and it was reviewed by Foothill College's Campus Conversations Faculty Leadership Team. (Link to Campus Conversations?)

Useable by Others: As a web-based course portfolio, it is available in the Carnegie Knowledge Media Lab, and all of the work and artifacts are usable by others.

A group of 1999 CASTL Scholars discuss their scholarship of teaching projects.

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