“Multimedia Pedagogy and Multicultural Education For The New Millennium”

New technologies provide tools to reconstruct education as we undergo dramatic technological revolution and enter a new millennium. In particular, multimedia technologies, like CD-ROMs and Internet websites produce new resources and material for expanding education. In examining the Shoah Project—which documents the experiences of survivors of the Holocaust—, we demonstrate how this project provides important tools for historical and religious education, as well as making the reality of the Holocaust vivid and compelling in the contemporary moment. It is within this context that we discuss how multimedia can provide an important supplement to multicultural education, bringing the experiences of marginal and oppressed groups to the mainstream. Yet we also argue that effective multimedia education also requires historical contextualization, the skills of media literacy, and engaging pedagogical presentation in the classroom to make such new technologies effective as a supplement to traditional classroom and print-based education. Hence, we show how educational technologies, such as those produced by the Shoah Foundation and the UCLA Film and Television Archives, can help reconstruct education for the next century.