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Teacher as Remixer: Professional Learning in an Open Participatory Network

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

Abstract

We will report on the social composing practices of educators engaged in an open, networked learning collaboration built on notions of production-centered participatory networks (Jenkins, 2006; Ito et al., 2013). The collaboration was designed to allow for interest-driven pathways to emerge as teachers-as-makers engaged in production, as opposed to the replication of existing forms. Exploring how educators participated in making multimediated artifacts, this paper examines how educators collaborated both on and offline in liminal and distal configurations, and distributed their writing across differing digital platforms.

Framed by a “writing-as-making” approach to social composing, we consider how a “craft paradigm” (Prins, 2012) decenters alphalinguistic notions of writing, refocusing attention on ways makers learn, use, and appropriate multimodal signs, tools, technologies to compose in/with community, and how textual objects are made, circulate in, and create relations among community participants. Foregrounding the democratic possibilities of production-centered making around shared objects (Latour, 2005), we highlight writing as an emergent, culturally situated social practice involving multimodal meaning-making.

Data were collected during two intensive month-long summer cycles. To date, 2217 educators self-selected as participants, composing and distributing compositions using Twitter (n=18656 tweets), a Google+ Community (n=1658 members), and personal websites (n=133 blogs), resulting in approximately 1600 publicly shared and distributed artifacts. Using a collaborative, interactive visual mapping tool, we analyzed relationships between participants’ makes and posts in one week through a transliteracies framework (Author 1 & Colleagues, 2014); i.e. looking for emergence across varied scales of activity, resonance among artifacts and ideas, and participants’ uptake of each other’s work and ideas.

To date, our analysis illuminates four distinct remix mobilities and relational tendencies among artifacts and makers--bursting, drifting, leveraging, turning. Participants iterated not only on each others’ textual objects, but also on the making processes themselves, indicating that remix literacies extend beyond objects to include socially shared practices. Bursting and drifting characterize the paces and proximities of remixing among the community. Bursting and drifting remixes were common occurrences--setting the stage as precursors to more radical remix--not causal, but as the microgensis of new relational dynamics (Prior & Hengst, 2011). With leveraging and turning, we identified remix behavior more obviously disruptive of power hierarchies and social processes. Rare among interactions, transgressive remix threw unspoken assumptions, histories, and community norms into relief, illuminating conservative forces at play in organizational history and the ways certain bodies or groups have remained on the fringes in professional development programming.

As studies of social composing are often youth-centered, our research extends these conversations by investigating the practices of adults, specifically teachers-as-makers, demonstrating the central role of remix as people actively engage in collaborative (re)making of texts, tools, processes, and meanings. With this, we extend from Knobel and Lankshear’s (2008) call to consider the potential of remix in learning environments to argue that remix is an embodied practice of learning. By encouraging remix as an iterative, collaborative practice, and displacing modes of content delivery typical of professional learning, we glimpse transformative possibilities for professional learning in new configurations.

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