Increasing Critical Multicultural Understanding Via Technology

Abstract

A university-school correspondence partnership project was designed, in part, to enhance the multicultural awareness and understanding of preservice teachers. This electronic mail-based correspondence project enabled undergraduates to interact with students from different cultural and experiential backgrounds. The focus of this article is the manner in which participation in the project provided many teachable moments, which resulted in the contextualized understanding of concepts, an awareness of biases and experiential gaps, increased critical self-reflection, and an orientation toward action for greater educational and social equity. The implications for technologically mediated communication to achieve these outcomes are also discussed.