Tinkering as Digital Equity Practice: Defining and Designing Digital Pedagogy for Designers of Learning Experiences

• In Event: 66.070 - Connected Learning in Teacher Education

Abstract

Research has highlighted the need for teacher education settings to prepare teachers to teach multiliteracies through hands-on exposure to and exploration of digital technologies (Ajayi, 2010). Missing from the literature however, is research on the “how” of developing digitally-proficient educators from a student-centered perspective. At the same time, Connected Learning research has demonstrated the vast social, intellectual, and cultural learning potential of digital technologies across platforms for youth (Ito et al., 2013). The conceptual model presented in this session seeks to extend the implications of connected learning experiences for youth to teachers.

This poster presents “tinker”— one component of the learn, tinker, share framework developed by Author (2018) as a conceptual model for training educators to expand their repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) with technology as they engage in communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1998). The research employs a digital pedagogy that centers the learning needs of educators as designers of learning experiences: educators whose remediation of Available Designs (New London Group, 1996) and metacognitive approach to their own learning and development as teachers positions them as agents in their own learning (Author, 2018). In this study, the designers of learning experiences, or DLEs, were preservice and inservice teachers.

The data analyzed comes from two years of a 3-year study of an educational technology course within a graduate-level teacher education program (n=24). The author used a grounded theory approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) to engage in selective coding of data. Study data included course syllabi, course assignments, and participant coursework (lesson plans and multimodal digital compositions). This poster defines and offers empirical exemplars of the “tinker sessions” across pre-service and in-service teacher education.

Drawing from literacy research including Gee’s 36 principles of learning (2014), Boykin & Noguera’s asset-orientation (2011), and authentic multimodal assessment (NWP Multimodal Assessment Project, 2011) the constitutive elements of tinker sessions are as follows:
(1) Designed and function like a game to center play in learning
(2) Designed with constraints that mimic real-life constraints
(3) Value learning process over product
(4) Expand participants’ repertoires of practice with technology.

As tinker sessions allow space for DLEs to engage as connected learners and try new media technologies and the affordances thereof, DLEs stand to gain nuanced perspective about the experience of youth learners’ practices. Such connected learning experiences democratize the learning terrain by enabling teachers to traverse roles and adopt a learner disposition en route to expansion of their digital proficiency. Tinker sessions afford opportunity for play in teacher education—a concept not thoroughly explored in the literature. Tinker sessions offer space to avoid flattening of narratives around digital proficiency among teacher populations as well as expansion of their repertoires of practice. Further, the ethos of a game, including thinking beyond constraints and valuation of learning process over product, serves to foster collegiality and intercultural and affective literacies required in the global, multimodal environments which make up our connected world. These outcomes yield consequential learning as educators develop integral multiliteracies they go on to use in designing learning experiences.

Author

• Cherise McBride, University of California - Berkeley