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The Pedagogical Artist: Teachers as Designers of Classroom Experiences

Sun, April 10, 10:35am to 12:05pm, Marriott Marquis, Floor: Level Two, Marquis Salon 15

Abstract

Much of the research on teacher planning frames teachers’ work as negotiating externally-determined factors such as curricular texts and disciplinary expectations (McCutcheon, 1980), colleagues and departmental organization (Brown, 1993) and technological resources and supports (Inan & Lowther, 2010). Even when teachers are recognized as designers (Jewitt, 2006; New London Group, 1996), their design processes are rarely acknowledged. These processes - including professional writing like lesson plans and unit plans, as well as trying out a tool before using it with students - are especially important to consider as classrooms increasingly incorporate digital technologies. How do teachers plan with and for new technologies, and what design processes do they use as they plan for student experiences with those new technologies?

This paper considers planning a form of critical making, with attention to how teachers bring ideas into the material world through their engagements with varied processes, products, and purposes (Dunnigan, 2013). To better understand how their planning-as-making has implications for students and their experiences, I turn to Dewey’s theory of aesthetics. He describes how the artist has an aesthetic experience as they create with chosen media, and what they create is a product intended to elicit an aesthetic experience. This iteratitve dynamic describes a teacher planning: a teacher makes plans with available media (including technologies) which, when enacted, become generative experiences for students.

This study expands upon a pilot study that investigated one teacher’s planning for and integration of Google Chromebooks in her 8th grade English Language Arts classroom. The teacher, an experienced middle school teacher and former National Writing Project participant, was interested in incorporating new platforms to encourage student writing practices. Data for this study included semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and fieldnotes. To further explore planning processes, I collected teacher planning artifacts and annotated curriculum documents, as well as maps drawn regarding processes and influences (West, 2011), and discussed them in process-specific interviews (Prior & Shipka, 2003).

As the teacher in the pilot study introduced herself and students to new technologies over the course of the school year, she consistently negotiated reasons to incorporate (and sometimes remove) new technologies as she wove them into established classroom practices. In planning for and enacting year-long integration of writing platforms (Google Docs, the classroom blog, Google Classroom), she created her own accounts, used the writing platforms before the students, and adapted her workflow as a result of platform updates. Her planning was often concerned with translating offline organizational systems in online spaces, streamlining student access to resources and writing spaces, and navigating perceived barriers the technologies created for the learning at hand.

Dewey (1938) argues that the central problem of an education based on experience is to “select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences” (p. 28). In asking how teachers select those experiences, this study foregrounds teacher designing processes. More specifically, it argues for a better understanding of how teachers plan/make with technologies as they look to create opportunities for students as makers with new technologies.

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