|
But some of the same qualities that
make it work for comedy make it valuable, too, as an outlet for
victimized children and for a new research method that tests the
empathy of teachers who may deal with them, says Sharon Tettegah, a
professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Tettegah believes so strongly in the
value of animation -- specifically, "animated narrative vignette
simulations" -- that she sought out a computer science professor at
Illinois, Brian Bailey, to help develop her concept for a
child-friendly program for producing them.
The program that resulted, called Clover, gives children, as well
as adults, a tool for making and sharing their own vignettes about
their personal and sometimes painful stories.
According to Tettegah, the program is the only one she is aware
of that allows the user to write the narrative, script the dialogue,
storyboard the graphics, and add voice and animation, all within one
application. Those four major aspects of producing a vignette gave
rise to the name "Clover," from the plant considered to bring good
luck in its four-leaf form.
A paper about Clover, written by Bailey, Tettegah and graduate
student Terry Bradley, has been published in the July issue of the
journal Interacting With Computers.
In other research, Tettegah has used animations as a tool for
gauging the empathy of teachers and others who might deal with
children and their stories of victimization. One study with college
education majors, or teachers-in-training, showed only one in 10
expressing a high degree of empathy for the victim, she said.
A paper about that study has been accepted by the journal
Contemporary Educational Psychology, with publication slated for
later this year. The co-author of the study is Carolyn Anderson, a
professor of educational psychology at Illinois.
Tettegah has done additional empathy studies with hundreds of
participants and will present some of that research at the
Association for Computing Machinery's conference July 30-Aug. 3 in
Boston and at the American Psychological Association convention Aug.
10-13 in New Orleans.
Animations are valuable in this kind of research because they go
beyond just text in visually telling a story, yet don't have the
distractions of video, Tettegah said. "Think about when you watch a
cartoon: You focus more on what they're saying and not on how they
look," she said.
Psychological research surveys often elicit "socially desirable"
or "forced choice" responses, Tettegah said. An animation, however,
can tell a story and then ask for an open-ended response, she said.
The subject has little or no clue what the researcher is looking
for.
In her empathy studies, Tettegah has found that most of the
subjects tend to focus on the perpetrator or other issues, rather
than showing concern for the victim.
This is a concern, she said, because a child being bullied or
called names wants the teacher's support. Yet the results also fit
with research by others showing that teachers often don't deal with
the problem when these incidents occur, the assumption having been
that they don't know how, she said.
[to top of second column] |
In the study to be published in Contemporary Educational
Psychology, each of the 178 subjects (142 women and 36 men), was
shown a short animated vignette, based on a story collected by
Tettegah in earlier research, involving a boy and girl, both 9 years
old.
In the vignette, the children are asked to work together on a
class project, and the boy tells the girl he doesn't want to work
with her because her skin color might rub off on him. (Two different
versions were used, with the boy being black and the girl white in
one version, and vice versa in the other version. The races of the
perpetrator and victim had no significant effect on subject
responses to the vignette, Tettegah said.)
As the story progresses, the girl tells her father about the
incident, and he then talks to the teacher.
After viewing the vignette, each subject was asked an open-ended
question about how he or she would have responded as the teacher in
the situation. They were given unlimited time and space to respond.
Tettegah and four research assistants then did a line-by-line
analysis of the subjects' responses and developed a system for
coding the content. They looked for content in four areas related to
empathy for the victim: concern for the victim, problem-solving with
the victim, mention of the victim and management of the situation
with the victim.
After the coding, Anderson, a statistical expert, analyzed the
resulting data, using sophisticated techniques involving latent
variable modeling. The results suggested a single latent variable
underlying the responses, showing very few of the pre-service
teachers expressing significant empathy for the victim in the
vignette.
Overall, fewer than 50 percent of the study participants
exhibited even low levels of empathy, and only 10 percent exhibited
a high level of empathy.
In light of these results, Tettegah, a former elementary teacher,
thinks some kind of empathy-awareness training, similar to cultural
or ethnic awareness training, should be considered as part of
training future teachers.
"I think that we are not, as teachers, tapped into those moral
emotions … it's not a deliberate thing -- you just don't even think
about it," Tettegah said. "But we need to be more aware of our
victims and what happens to them, because they sometimes get damaged
for life."
Clover was designed with that concern also in mind, Tettegah
said. The program gives students a powerful means for telling their
stories, whether of victimization or dealing with other moral or
social dilemmas, she said. Ideally, their animated vignettes can be
shared anonymously and used in character-building exercises in the
classroom.
The program "really engages students and excites them," Tettegah
said. In producing the vignettes, they gain a strong sense of
ownership, she said, and at the same time build their writing,
critical thinking and technology skills.
Tettegah has been demonstrating and testing Clover in local
schools since last fall, and with positive results, she said.
[University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign News Bureau] |
