Women, WebQuests, and Controversial Issues in the ...

Social Education 69(4), pp. 143-148 © 2005 National Council for the Social Studies

Women, WebQuests, and Controversial Issues in the Social Studies Margaret Smith Crocco and Judith Cramer

America has been called “the argument culture,” but you

wouldn’t know it from many social studies classrooms.1 Despite a longstanding tradition in social studies of teaching controversial issues, all too few of today’s classrooms accommodate this kind of intellectual activity.2 Perhaps it’s the pressure of high stakes testing, or the emphasis on teaching history—often done in a transmission, or didactic mode—or a reluctance to bring up polarizing topics in the currently politicized school climate. Whatever the reason, young people today may graduate from high school having had little chance to debate or otherwise discuss contemporary controversial issues.3 This is a missed opportunity on more than one account. Research has shown such academic endeavors to be highly motivating for adolescents in making judgments and forming their own opinions about adult topics.4 Studies have also demonstrated the importance of open-ended inquiry for deepening understanding of subject matter.5 Experts in teaching and learning frequently group approaches based on inquiry, debate, and engagement with challenging issues under the umbrella term “constructivism,” a word that teachers associate with student-centered curricula and classroom activities.6 The spread of digital technology in schools over the last two decades has brought attention to its potential for supporting constructivist or student-centered pedagogy. Though there are many reasons to consider integrating technology into social studies classrooms, one of the strongest is that it can be a way to leverage powerful forms of learning.7 In our work at Teachers College, Columbia University, we have tested this idea in Crocco’s course “Women of the World: Issues in Teaching,” a preservice elective in global studies focused on gender which often deals with controversial subject matter. We have looked for technology tools to help students engage deeply with gender issues in a global context. We have also made an effort to evaluate both the tools and our use of them in preparing future teachers to include material on women and gender in the social studies curriculum. Here we consider WebQuests, included in the Women of the World course since 2002. Our experience has shown us that WebQuests are well suited to teaching controversial issues, particularly contemporary controversial issues, for which data and other

timely resources are likely to be published on the internet. However, we have also seen that when the controversial issue around which a WebQuest is to be created is gender, there are certain considerations a teacher must take into account—an insight which, in turn, has led us to cast a critical eye at web-based resources for teaching about women of the world. This is, perhaps, another way of saying that our own quest for understanding, in which we asked—“What are the affordances and constraints of the WebQuest form for teaching about women, or gender, or controversial issues generally in a global context?”—has, like most inquiry-based activities, raised some very interesting new questions.8 These we address at the end of the essay, where we provide a set of guidelines for educators interested in adapting the WebQuest to social studies teaching about women’s controversial issues. Gender Equity, Technology, and Teacher Education

In previous writing, we have promoted infusing technology into social studies teacher education by using it with subject matter relevant to women’s lives.9 One obvious rationale for doing this is that most of our students—like most preservice students and most school teachers throughout the country—are women. It is important to note, of course, that teaching about women involves teaching about men. Since gender roles are closely linked, change in one generally means change in the other. No one should feel left out in these learning experiences when the focus shifts from men to women in the social studies classroom. To date, Women of the World: Issues in Teaching has never been an entirely female class. Male students have consistently elected to take it, bringing a range of perspectives to our discussions of gender equity, whether in places across the globe or close to home in the New York City schools. Recent studies by the American Association of University Women and other groups indicate that gender remains one of the intractable “digital divides.”10 Young women in school often view technology’s preponderantly male culture as threatening, according to these research reports. Outside school, the marketing of video games to a target audience of adolescent boys, for example, reinforces young women’s “computational reticence,” and may be

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a reason that, even when not totally alienated from it, girls are less prone to be early adopters of technology.11 Paradoxically, despite being “feminized professions,” teaching and teacher education have not made gender a central concern. Researchers Jo Sanders, Peggy Blackwell, and David Sadker, among others, have shown how issues of gender have played very little part in teacher education, and have been largely ignored in the standard curriculum, accreditation requirements, and basic textbooks.12 In other words, educators interested in attending to gender and technology in teacher education face a double set of hurdles. We have chosen to introduce the issue of gender and technology in an implicit rather than explicit fashion by including technology in the course syllabus as method not content. Our students learn to use technology partly through direct instruction, and partly—but in our view more significantly—through modeling by the course instructors. The Women of the World course, though not required, annually draws between half and two-thirds of each entering cohort of master’s students. The class devotes much time to controversial issues that abound in a study of gender from a global perspective—arranged marriages, female genital mutilation, and veiling, to name a few. Two key course texts help students meet challenges of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism in dealing with this subject matter: Chila Bulbeck’s Reorienting Western Feminisms and Joni Seager’s State of Women of the World Atlas.13 While technology has made its way throughout the Program in Social Studies at Teachers College in recent years, it has perhaps been integrated most seamlessly here. With female instructors modeling its use to a mostly female class, we take double-barreled aim at the gendered divide in technology and teacher education.14 Our goal has been to make technology an agent of our students’ empowerment as social studies teachers, bearing in mind the many vicissitudes and constraints they face in their student teaching placements and future jobs in the New York City public schools. Our technology integration plan, developed over three years’ time, adheres to a few, simple principles:15 use widely available, easy-tolearn, inexpensive digital tools; model ways to use these tools with essential course content; help students take responsibility for their own technology mastery; require student technology projects to be scalable (see below); and emphasize and prize student innovation with technology. We regularly survey our students to learn about their technology skills, their attitudes toward technology, and use of technology in their classrooms—how these change over time, including beyond the time of the Women of the World course. Our overarching goal is to encourage our students and graduates to keep gender in mind as they plan curriculum and to keep technology in mind as they select their teaching practices. Although, as we have noted, we do not present the relationship between technology and gender as part of our course content, students have commented on aspects of this relationship with increasing frequency since we began our work in 2001. We have welcomed this new student understanding enthusiastically.16

Why WebQuests?

Introduced a decade ago at San Diego State University by teacher educators Bernie Dodge and Tom March, WebQuests have since been created by classroom teachers for every curricular level and most academic subjects. An early article by Dodge defines a WebQuest as: an inquiry-oriented activity in which most or all of the information used by learners is drawn from the web. WebQuests are designed to use learners’ time well, to focus on using information rather than looking for it, and to support learners’ thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.17 WebQuests can bring together important elements of some much touted approaches to teaching and learning, including critical thinking, cooperative learning, authentic assessment, and technology integration.18 In his online publications, available at www.ozline. com, March maintains that WebQuests enhance student motivation and performance • by giving students a central question that needs answering using higher level thinking skills; • by providing real-world resources with which to work and linking those resources to a real-world problem; • by allowing students to take on roles in cooperative learning groups that help them work in teams while encouraging high levels of personal performance; • by making their answers and solutions available online to a broader audience for feedback and evaluation. We anticipated that WebQuests could meet all five of our technology criteria. The abundance of online materials, for example, allowed our students to get started on their own. We asked them to explore the official WebQuest site (webquest.sdsu.edu), which contains a matrix of examples, many created by Dodge’s students, and a “Taskonomy,” or list of culminating activities for WebQuests. After reading Dodge’s “Five Rules for Writing a Great WebQuest,” students examined and reported to each other on a series of WebQuests about women’s lives—some imagined, like those of Henrik Ibsen’s Nora and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy—posted on various academic websites.19 Our purpose in this exercise was to develop students’ critical acumen as prospective WebQuest designers. At first they were reluctant to criticize anything published at an “official” WebQuest venue, but eventually they were able not only to note specific errors, like the use of inappropriate web resources, but to recognize the important distinction between WebQuests that in one way or another are about women and WebQuests that address the essential—controversial—issues of gender that are the focus of their study. The NCSS publications, Social Education and Social Studies and the Young Learner, have published a number of articles featuring WebQuest ideas for social studies at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.20 However, none of these addresses contemporary controversial issues or women. As our classroom exercise revealed, and as any interested teacher will quickly see from a Google search, among the hundreds of WebQuests now posted on the web that deal with women, women’s history, and women’s

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issues, only a small number meet the criteria, and thus approach the educative promise, that Dodge and March set forth for this form of pedagogy. As one of our students succinctly put it, many teachers have made use of WebQuests to create what are merely digital worksheets for reports on famous females. Though their topics may be women, these WebQuests rarely address contemporary controversial issues, or concern women of the world. The Shabanu WebQuest

Our next step was to have students work hands-on with the WebQuest form as a tool for delivering our essential course content—first to “take” a WebQuest about an issue related to gender and then to make one of their own. These social studies preservice students completed a WebQuest focused on the question of whether or not to teach Shabanu, a popular but controversial adolescent novel by Suzanne Fisher Staples set in Pakistan. We then asked them as an end-ofcourse assignment to create a WebQuest on an issue of importance to the world’s women that they could use in their current or future social studies classroom. In this way we helped them focus in on the WebQuest as a tool for teaching about women, gender, and controversial issues generally. We hoped to create an occasion for learning in which we, as well as our students, could tease out the implications of turning this time-tested form to new educational ends. Fisher Staples’s Shabanu has been read by countless American middleschoolers. Any search of the internet will provide information about this author, her work, and the many purposes this young adult novel has served in American classrooms. Elsewhere, Crocco has written of her reservations about Shabanu as an exemplar of “multicultural literature.”21 In 2002, she created a WebQuest (www. tc.edu/faculty/crocco/webquestshabanu.htm) on this subject for the Women of the World course. The WebQuest challenges students as follows: “You have been charged with the task of researching and reporting on the issues raised by the teaching of the novel Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind. You are a teacher who will be making a presentation to the school board in your town about whether this novel represents a suitable multicultural text for middle school readers.” The Shabanu WebQuest demands much more reading than would be suitable for younger students, at least within the time frame of the one preservice class we devoted to this task (a period of 100 minutes). As in any well-designed WebQuest, the information is “chunked” into components which help to scaffold prior understandings students must reach in order to make a final informed judgment. Using the internet to gather resources for answering the essential question “To use or not to use Shabanu?” is key. Comparable resources on this topic are not available in print form. Likewise, the task in this WebQuest is authentic because asking students to make judgments about curriculum materials accurately forecasts the kinds of responsibilities they will face as teachers. Finally, the concerns about this book are genuine. Many Islamic organizations proscribe its use on their websites yet it remains a popular depiction of a subject, Pakistani girlhood, and is beloved by many American teachers.

Online our students could encounter Muslim women, for instance, who compared using the story of Shabanu to represent Pakistani girlhood (as a whole) to using an Amish girl’s life to represent all American girlhood. At the same time, they could read the avid testimonies of middle school teachers who swear by the novel’s effectiveness as an instrument for teaching social and religious tolerance. These experiences generated lively discussion and much enthusiasm among our students for creating WebQuests of their own. The Student WebQuests

The Women of the World course syllabus suggested a process for formulating WebQuest topics and generating WebQuest designs at the same time. The student was asked to prepare a WebQuest: on a topic of your choosing that is discussed in Bulbeck’s and/or Seager’s book. Select something you would teach at the secondary level. Aim for a “backwards design” process in which you use [the software] Inspiration to map out your goals and work backwards from those goals to the design of the WebQuest. On the last day of the course, be prepared to share your work with the rest of the class. Write a 3-5-page paper to accompany the WebQuest explaining your choices. Attach the paper to the printed out WebQuest, or to a CDROM with the WebQuest.22 In classroom discussion we elaborated on the backwards design process alluded to in this written assignment. The approach we advocated may be summarized as follows: (1) formulate an essential question of gender (or select a women’s issue) to serve as the focus of your WebQuest; (2) correlate a task (or combination of tasks) from the WebQuest Taskonomy, or from your own imagination, with your question or issue, to serve as evidence of student learning on this subject; (3) devise student teams and student roles within teams to complete the task(s) in a way that will maximize individual and cooperative learning and allow you to assess this learning fairly for all individuals and groups; (4) pay special attention to gender issues in designing student teams, roles, and assessment rubrics (see below); (5) where appropriate, involve students in the formulation of teams, roles, and rubrics and incorporate their feedback. Generally the WebQuests students have created for the Women of the World course have capitalized on the medium’s potential for introducing controversial issues into the social studies classroom. In previous years, a number of students produced WebQuests about issues raised in some of the course’s literary texts: In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez’s novel of the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, for instance, or Haveli, a sequel to Shabanu. This year, the focus of their WebQuests included veiling, women and AIDS in Africa, gender equality, development and peace in the twenty-first century, literacy and women, women and revolution, sexual identity, and marriage. Several of these WebQuests were particularly well done and provocative, suggesting how using the WebQuest form to teach controversial issues might lead to innovation. We will briefly describe three. Mario’s WebQuest began with situating the AIDS crisis in

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Africa within the context of gender, not only the “disproportionate impact of the epidemic on women, but also the ways in which gender oppression has contributed to the spread of HIV/AIDS.”23 The essential question his project raises is how best to combat the problem of AIDS in Africa since it so directly involves confrontation with the social status of women in many African countries. The online readings he assembled address this particular aspect of the crisis very well. Students work in groups to study and evaluate the benefits, drawbacks, and potential problems in engaging gender issues directly as a strategy for dealing with AIDS in Africa. The task for these groups is to determine how best to spend a large allocation of money that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation intends to make to selected African countries to tackle the gendered dimension of the AIDS epidemic. Francesca’s WebQuest calls for a United Nations World Conference on Women, to be held in Montreal in 2005, to address the gendered nature of problems related to trafficking, poverty, education, and domestic violence.24 Students are divided into cooperative learning groups, each of which represents one country: Kenya, Pakistan, Russia, Brazil, and Canada. With one student to research one topic in each group, they are asked to investigate how their countries are implicated in these problems and what measures each country should take to address them. The WebQuest culminates in a simulation of the conference in which students are required to give a speech or write a position paper based on their particular areas of expertise. Student conference delegates also debate the proposed solution and vote on a final set of resolutions. Jackie’s WebQuest—provocatively but aptly titled “Can We Count Past Two?”— deals with the thorny essential question: “What do you think makes a man a ‘man’ and a woman a ‘woman’?” or “What is the connection between gender role and the cultural concept of the person?” Her title alludes to the fact that other cultures present more than two genders. In this learning experience, students take on the responsibilities of cultural anthropologists investigating how three cultures conceptualize gender. Of students taking her WebQuest, Jackie writes: “One of the main goals of cultural anthropology is to be able to contribute productively to public debate about social and cultural issues. Thus, their task is to work cooperatively toward breaking down Western society’s male/female divide among their school’s student body through bringing awareness of the existence of third genders.”25 Students review documents dealing with third genders in India (hijras), Samoa (fa’afafine), and the Native American Navajo nation (nadles/nadleehi) in light of five assumptions Westerners make about gender: 1. There are two and only two genders; 2. Gender is not capable of change; 3. Genitals are the essential signs of gender; 4. The male/female division is natural; 5. Being masculine or feminine is natural and not a matter of choice.26 Students choose how to communicate what they learn to their fellow students, but the objective remains “to break down the Western culture’s assumption of the dichotomy of male and female

among your school’s student body” by increasing awareness of the notion of third genders as exemplified in several other cultures.27 They can write an article for their school newspaper, or create a poster or museum exhibit about third genders. Each student writes a short paper that answers the question, “What do you think makes a man a ‘man’ and a woman a ‘woman’?” From the surveys we administer annually in the course, as well as classroom discussions, we have been able to gauge student reactions to WebQuests. These have been quite positive in pointing to the benefits of challenging inquiry learning. Interestingly, students have expressed differing opinions about whether WebQuests can be considered student-centered if teachers select all the websites. Our view is that inquiry learning works best if teachers structure the exercise, unavoidably imposing a degree of control, but creating a framework that allows significant scope for students to reach their own conclusions about controversial issues. Given the realities of tight schedules, scarce equipment, and the predictable inefficiency of setting students free to research complex topics with Google, we believe that WebQuests offer a workable model for inquiry-oriented, student-centered learning in the social studies classroom. One way to make this digital tool even more student-centered might be to help students become proficient enough during their K-12 careers to develop their own WebQuests. For example, youngsters introduced to WebQuests in elementary or middle school grades might become WebQuest creators as high school students.28 Our students have consistently expressed concern about the lack of resources for teaching with technology in their urban social studies classrooms. It was to address this concern that we developed the “scalability” requirement for technology projects across the preservice curriculum in the Program in Social Studies at Teachers College. Because we want our students to be able to conceptualize for the real world, we insist that a good project ought to succeed in a one-computer classroom (based on a rotation of student work groups), as well as in a computer lab where each student has a work station, or in any number of technology settings in between these two, such as the classroom with four or five computers. A one-toone computer-to-student ratio is not a precondition for undertaking WebQuest projects. Typically, WebQuest projects require several student teams, depending on class size. If equipment is scarce, teachers can organize the WebQuest process so that student teams rotate on and off computers at appropriate times, as part of completing the WebQuest task as a whole. Teachers can supplement the project websites with relevant printed materials. Each of the models for social studies instruction contained in the Handbook on Teaching Social Issues involves strategies and steps for student engagement with any controversial issue that include (1) orientation to the problem; (2) definitions; (3) values clarification; (4) predicting consequences for taking a course of action; and (5) justifying a decision.29 Using Francesca’s WebQuest as an example, for instance, groups of students might be following these steps: (1) beginning reflection on gender by writing or talking about how their lives might be different were they born a member of the opposite sex; (2) using print resources to investigate the meaning of terms like


feminism, gender, equity, poverty, domestic violence, trafficking, etc.; (3) using online resources to develop a deeper understanding of the problem; (4) participating in structured discussion or written assignments to elicit values pertinent to decision making; and (5) coming to an understanding of their countries’ positions and preparing their speeches or papers.30 In this example, students would use a computer to gather the kind of information that is available on the internet but not likely to be available elsewhere—up-to-date statistics on trafficking, for example. As in the Shabanu WebQuest, where students were able to read first person testimonials that might never see print, here students would be using web resources in a highly targeted fashion. Staggering the student teams’ work this way might make the WebQuest take a bit longer to complete than it might in a computer lab, but there would also be more opportunity for students to benefit from each other’s experience with parts of the process. Almost all students in the Women of the World class believe WebQuests would be highly motivational for secondary level students. Almost universally they have indicated their eagerness to use the best examples found online or even to create their own sometime in the future. A consistently large majority has felt that WebQuests offer a unique and effective resource for teaching contemporary controversial issues related to women and gender, especially given the excellent range of sources available about such topics on the web and the ease with which opposing viewpoints on such issues can be found. We recognize that not all the WebQuests described here will be suitable for students in every school district and grade level, even some high school settings. We take it for granted that teachers will exercise the same professional judgment in creating or adapting WebQuests that they do in selecting any other educational materials for use with students in their classes and communities. One of the great virtues of WebQuests in particular, and of inquiry-oriented engagement with controversial issues generally, is the room these approaches allow for expression of divergent values systems. Providing students with the opportunity to apply their values to contemporary social problems and to justify their positions through rational discourse will help them become mature citizens in a democratic society. Offering democratic civic education without ever providing such opportunity seems a professional dereliction of duty. A Dozen Principles for Creating WebQuests on Women’s Issues

We believe that using technology successfully in the social studies classroom or in social studies teacher education requires knowledge of subject matter as well as the educational potential of technology for enhancing teaching and learning. Marrying technology to teaching controversial issues moves instruction towards higher order thinking skills and motivates students to learn. But technology has no magic for moving social studies in this direction without skillful teacher intervention. To this end, we draw from the literature on teaching social issues and from that on WebQuests, as well as from our own teaching experiences, to offer a set of principles for dealing

with controversial issues on women through WebQuests: 1. Avoid essentialism. That is, acknowledge that women are not all alike; do not stereotype women. 2. Be sensitive to issues of cultural relativism, promoting the understanding that different cultures deal differently with gender roles. 3. Focus on perspective taking and create a tolerance for ambiguity in considering social issues, whether online or offline. 4. Develop student capacity for reasoned consideration and rigorous use of evidence in framing arguments. Rely on primary source evidence whenever possible. 5. Pose questions that are meaningful and challenging, about which differing views can readily be taken, and in support of all of which views online resources can be found. 6. Scaffold the WebQuest’s essential question by “chunking” the learning experience. Student learning should unfold in a stepby-step fashion that breaks down the big question into subsidiary ones, each with a corresponding, manageable set of websites. 7. Require students to produce an authentic product, such as a speech, debate, position paper, newspaper editorial, Model UN simulation, etc., combining several tasks. 8. Incorporate group work and live discussion in the WebQuest task(s) and process. 9. Create roles that are authentic but also free of gender bias. Organize the roles in a project structure of positive interdependence. 10. Select bias-free websites that do not themselves perpetuate gender stereotypes through loaded language or imagery. Subject all websites to careful scrutiny. 11. Allow sufficient time for students to complete the WebQuest, to savor ambiguities and complexities. 12. Provide scope for student initiative in the WebQuest process. If too tightly controlled, WebQuests can be more teacher-centered than student-centered. All men and women have a stake in grappling with gender, one of the most challenging issues found in contemporary societies at home and abroad. Offering prospective teachers and their students an opportunity to engage with controversial issues related to women and gender in social studies classrooms provides an authentic introduction to the lived experiences most will encounter as they confront change in the world. Notes 1. Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture: From Debate to Dialogue (New York: Random House, 1998). 2. Ronald W. Evans and David Warren Saxe, eds., Handbook for Teaching Controversial Issues, NCSS Bulletin 93 (Washington, D.C.: NCSS, 1996). For a classical work on this subject, see Donald W. Oliver and James P. Shaver, Teaching Public Issues in the High School (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966). For an approach to teaching about conflict in historical contexts, see James A. Percoco, Divided We Stand: Teaching about Conflict in U.S. History (Portsmouth, N.H.: 2001). For one example of such an approach employing the internet, see Philip Molebash, “Web Historical Inquiry Projects,” Social Education 68, no. 3 (2004): 226-229. Using historical cases to teach the kinds of reasoning, writing, and speaking skills related to citizenship education which are promoted in this article admittedly offers a “safer” avenue for teaching an issues-centered curriculum. 3. A Public Agenda survey indicates that “Relatively few teachers (6 to 13 percent) wanted to introduce divisive issues into their classrooms,” as quoted in “Some Problems in

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4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

Acknowledging Diversity,” by Nathan Glazer, in Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti, eds. Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 168-187. In a related vein, Ronald W. Evans, Patricia G. Avery, and Patricia Velde Pederson discuss some of the reasons behind teacher reluctance to teach social issues generally in their article, “Taboo Topics: Cultural Restraint on Teaching Social Issues” in The Social Studies 90, no. 5 (September/October 1999): 218-224. We acknowledge the difficulty in teaching controversial issues; however, we encourage teachers to find workable ways to accomplish this goal since bringing such issues into the secondary classroom plays an important role in socializing students to essential aspects of democratic civic participation. Carole L. Hahn, “Chapter 4: Research on Issues-Centered Social Studies,” in Handbook on Teaching Controversial Issues, eds. Evans and Saxe, 25-42. For another view of the value of teaching social issues in a manner aimed at developing negotiation and conflict resolution skills, see Stacie Nicole Smith, “Teaching for Civic Participation with Negotiation Role Plays,” Social Education 69, no. 3 (2004): 194-197; For a recent research study on teaching controversial issues, see Diana Hess, “Discussing Controversial Public Issues in Secondary Social Studies Classrooms: Learning from Skilled Teachers,” Theory and Research in Social Education 30, no. 1 (Winter, 2002): 10-41. M. Suzanne Donovan and John D. Bransford, eds., How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom (Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, 2005). Peter Doolittle and David Hicks, “Constructivism as a Theoretical Foundation for Use of Technology in Social Studies,” Theory and Research in Social Education 3, no.1 (Winter 2003): 72-105. Margaret Smith Crocco, “Leveraging Constructivist Learning in the Social Studies Classroom,” Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education: Social Studies 1, no. 3, www.citejournal.org. Molebash comments on this characteristic of inquiry-based activities in “Web Historical Inquiry Projects,” 226. Margaret Smith Crocco and Judith Cramer, “Technology Use, Women, and Global Studies in Social Studies Education,” Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference, no. 1, (2004): 4773-4780 (online proceedings). To be re-published in Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education: Social Studies (www.citejournal.org) 4, no. 4 (2005). American Association of University Women (AAUW), Tech Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age (Washington, D.C.: Author, 2000). Available at www.aauw.org/ research/girls_education/techsavvy.cfm. Sherry Turkle, cited in Margaret Honey, et al., “Girls and Design: Exploring the Question

of Technological Imagination,” The Jossey Bass Reader on Gender in Education (San Francisco, Calif., 2002): 329-345; James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 12. Jo Sanders, “Something is Missing from Teacher Education: Attention to Two Genders,” Phi Delta Kappan 84, no. 3 (November 2002): 241-44. Accessed online at www.pdkintl. org/kappan/k0211san.htm; Peggy Blackwell, et al., Education Reform and Teacher Education: The Missing Discourse of Gender (Washington, D.C.: American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 2000); Karen Zittleman and David Sadker, “Gender Bias in Teacher Education Texts,” Journal of Teacher Education 53, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 168-180. 13. Chila Bulbeck, Reorienting Western Feminisms (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Joni Seager, State of Women of the World Atlas, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1997). 14. Among the specific recommendations of the AAUW study, Tech Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age, is emphasizing design rather than mere consumption of technology, and changing technology’s public face. 15. We have described our overall strategy of infusing technology use into this course in the article, “Technology Use, Women, and Global Studies in Social Studies Education,” and “A Virtual Hall of Mirrors? Confronting the Digital Divide in Urban Social Studies Teacher Education,” Journal of Computing in Teacher Education 20, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 133137. 16. Crocco and Cramer, “Technology Use, Women, and Global Studies in Social Studies Education.” 17. Bernie Dodge, “Some Thoughts about WebQuests” [Online], 1995. Available at edWeb. sdsu.edu/courses/edtec596/about_Webquests.html. 18. Tom March, “WebQuests for Learning. Why WebQuests? An Introduction.” Accessed online at www.ozline.com/webquests/intro.html on January 4, 2005. 19. Dodge, “Five Rules for Writing a Great WebQuest,” Learning & Leading with Technology 28, no. 8 (May 2001): 7-9, 58. 20. See, for example, Philip Molebash, et al., “Kickstarting Inquiry with WebQuests and Web Inquiry Projects,” Social Education 67, no. 3. (April 2003): 158-162; Molebash, “Web Historical Inquiry Projects,” Social Education 68, no. 3 (April 2004): 226; Andrew J. Milson and Portia Downey, “WebQuest: Using Internet Resources for Cooperative Inquiry,” Social Education 65 no. 3 (April 2001): 144-46; Sherry Wennik, “Reporting on the Process of Legislation: A Civics WebQuest,” Social Studies and the Young Learner 17, no. 1 (September/October 2004): 11-14; Philip Van Fossen, “Using WebQuests to Scaffold Higher Order Thinking,” Social Studies and the Young Learner 16, no. 4 (March/ April 2004): 13-16. 21. Margaret Smith Crocco, “Teaching Shabanu: The Challenges of Using World Literature in the Social Studies Classroom,” Journal of Curriculum Studies (forthcoming). 22. From Crocco’s 2004 syllabus for “Women of the World: Issues in Teaching.” Students had learned to use Inspiration (along with Timeliner, another software we consider useful for social studies) in an earlier class. 23. Mario Mazzoni, “Women and AIDS in Africa: An Interactive WebQuest.” Paper in the possession of this article’s authors. New York, 2004. 24. Francesca Miller, “The United Nations World Conference on Women: A WebQuest.” Paper in the possession of this article’s authors. New York, 2004. 25. Jaclyn T. Zapanta, “Can We Count Past Two?” Paper in the possession of this article’s authors. New York, 2004 26. Mary Hawkesworth, “Confounding Gender,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 22, (Fall 1997): 649-685. 27. Ibid. 28. For young women in high school, this plan would serve the recommendations of the AAUW and other research studies, all of which stress creativity with technology as a way of countering girls’ lack of interest in, fear of, or alienation from technology. 29. Evans and Saxe, Handbook on Teaching Social Issues. See, for example, pages 55-58. 30. Modeled after the Engle-Ochoa Model found on page 57 of the Handbook on Teaching Social Issues.

Judith Cramer is the educational technology specialist at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York. She can be reached at [email protected]. Margaret Smith Crocco is associate professor of social studies and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She can be reached at [email protected].
