CREATIVE CURRICULUM
LSU researchers investigate teaching techniques and children’s knowledge of hurricanes

Many teachers in the state of Louisiana follow a specific curriculum, one that is designed to ensure that teachers cover the same material at the same time, keep schools in pace with one another, and attempts to ease transitions when students move from one school to another. But what should teachers do when unexpected factors come into play — stick to the approved curriculum or devise new methods to address these new concerns? Researchers at LSU are exploring that very question.

After Hurricane Katrina, teachers at the LSU Child Development Laboratory Preschool in the School of Human Ecology observed that as they tried to teach about transportation, the children repeatedly steered discussions toward the numerous helicopters, fire trucks, and other emergency vehicles in Baton Rouge. During play, the children’s games seemed to be fueled by their thoughts of hurricanes as they turned from making mud gumbo to building levees out of dirt. With the children so distracted by their own storm experiences, the teachers decided to teach about hurricanes instead. The result was “Project Katrina.”

This experience generated a project designed to investigate what other teachers were doing in their classrooms and how that was related to what children knew about hurricanes. Funded by the National Science Foundation and led by LSU associate professor of education Teresa Buchanan, the project consists of two phases. In the first phase, Buchanan and her co-investigators professor Diane C. Burts, human ecology, and associate professor Timothy Page, social work, surveyed 1000 teachers in Louisiana, 500 teachers in hurricane prone areas of Georgia and South Carolina, and 500 teachers from schools in Tennessee where hurricanes are not common. The surveys were designed to ascertain what teachers did in their classrooms in response to Katrina and Rita, if anything. Phase two took place in schools across southern Louisiana where researchers observed a sample of the surveyed teachers and interviewed 150 children in those classrooms. The children’s ages ranged from 4- to 8-years old.

To interview such young children, researchers constructed a special method of inquiry. They modified the story-stem methodology used by Page in his research.

“Young children’s responses are not always verbal. They often use gestures like twirling a finger to indicate the direction and motion of a hurricane,” says Buchanan. “The story-stem methodology allows us to make cross-sectional comparisons of children’s knowledge.”

Researchers carefully selected materials to use for six short narratives. By using objects like toy cars and buildings to set up simple narrative scenarios, beginning each story themselves, and allowing the children to take control and narrate the outcome, researchers were able to discover how much the children knew about hurricanes in general and Katrina and Rita in particular. This kind of research is beneficial for understanding how classroom teaching is related to children’s knowledge. With this information, researchers can learn how teachers can respond to all types of disruptions in more effective ways.

ON THE WEB:
LSU College of Education
Project Katrina

from Summer 2006 Issue