Tweeting Alongside Teachers: The Need for an Emic Approach in Researching Educational Social Media Uses

• In Event: 68.049 - Data, Big and Small

Abstract

My interest in how and why educators use social media sprung from my own daily uses and dilemmas. Once I left the classroom for higher education, I sought to maintain close connections with classroom teachers. While I explored numerous platforms, the ease with which Twitter facilitated engagements through hashtags was exciting. Educators utilize hashtags to create an array of affinity spaces (e.g., #edchat, #OklaEd, #sschat, #educolor) where participatory cultures thrive within social media spaces (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, & Robison, 2009). Engagements in these online spaces are often characterized by collaborative engagements and porous leadership. I do not just interact with educators utilizing these hashtags when I have a research project, but I have continually engaged with educators on Twitter and co-lead a weekly Twitter chat (e.g., scheduling synchronous chat moderators, maintaining chat archives, participating in chats). Participating in such activities has offered me complex understandings of the nuances of teacher practices via Twitter, and this has been invaluable in my formulation of studies, interpretation of data, and recommendation of implications. Just as importantly, engaging in practices alongside teachers situates me in a more equitable position from which to pursue research aims.

Unfortunately, research in education has long been plagued by a product-process research paradigm where university researchers study classroom teachers’ practices from an etic or outsider approach (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993). In the realm of educational social media research, assumptions that practices are linear and results are generalizable can lead researchers to overlook the complexity of teaching contexts, teacher agency, and shifting digital spaces (Hogan & Quan-Haase, 2010). While big data research projects can offer findings concerning broad trends, the meaning and nuances of such data can easily be misinterpreted or misapplied without emic knowledge. Therefore, I am making a simple argument: that the complex, contextual, and shifting practices of teachers can be better researched by those who engage via social media alongside teachers.

While I have gathered large-scale survey data on teacher uses of Twitter, I have found far more insights by listening to teachers and students’ rationales for the benefits and drawbacks of online activities. When I utilized a survey to better understand how and why teachers utilize Twitter (Author, 2014), the most impactful findings emerged not from the teachers’ quantitative data about usage frequency or identified actions, but from their open-ended explanations of their purposes. For example, numerous teachers in my study confessed that Twitter had helped them overcome various forms of isolation. I was able to identify and understand this theme because I had encountered it previously from interactions with teachers who had confessed to me that engagement within Twitter affinity groups had saved their careers. By proceeding from an emic perspective, researchers can better understand the nuances of the phenomenon. While generalizable findings are seductive, offering insights to educators who can empower them to determine the applicability of research to their situations. Because, if researchers hope to influence teacher practices then they should justify their work to practitioners, and not the other way around.

Author

• Daniel G Krutka, University of North Texas