A Decade of Research on Preservice Teachers' Learning With Social Media: Insights on the State of the Field

• In Event: Educators Meet the Fifth Estate: Social Media in Education

Abstract

Today, one-third of the world’s population use social media to find people and resources for real-time information and connection across geographical, cultural and economic borders. In this growing social media space those engaged in the work of education must bridge cloud to class, developing “network literacy” across physical classroom boundaries, distributing quality instructional resources within changing organizational contexts, and advancing teachers’ professional knowledge base.

Objectives and Perspectives
To launch this symposium, this paper provides a systematic review of over a decade of educational research from around the world to present the state-of-the-field of teacher preparation within the Fifth Estate, networks of influence among individuals. Specifically, this paper reviews empirical research to examine how the next generation of K-12 educators: pre-service teachers, perceive and use social media for pedagogy, professional learning and development. In response to the 2019 AERA annual meeting theme, we review the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of this body of work to set a course for future research foci, methodological techniques, theory-building, and multimodal narratives needed in a ‘post-truth’ era.

Methods and Data Sources
Following standards for quality and validity in systematic literature reviews (Boote & Beile, 2005; Machi & McEvoy, 2016; Moher, Liberati, Tetzlaff, Altman, & The PRISMA Group, 2009), we outline categories to which the reviewer must attend in conducting a quality review: coverage (having criteria for inclusion and exclusion); synthesis (summary, analysis, and synthesis of selected literature); and significance (discussion of the implications of the existing research). A first criterion for inclusion was that an article had been published between 2007-2018. A second criterion was that the article had been published in peer-reviewed journals dedicated mostly or entirely to the topic (e.g., educational technology journals) or in high quality general education journals (e.g., Review of Education Research). Using four major educational research databases searches and table-of-content scans covering over 100 journals, we identified 1282 empirical articles. Two raters screened these articles based on our inclusion and exclusion criteria. This work builds and extends earlier reviews of the research literature that have focused only on one social media (e.g., Facebook) or found the majority of studies concerned college students and not K-12 pre-service/in-service teachers or their students (Manca & Ranieri, 2013). To establish the quality of selected articles, empirical articles needed to demonstrate: clear statement of research questions; claims and interpretations grounded in evidence and theory; and systematic documentation of procedures (Freeman, deMarrais, Preissle, Roulston & St Pierre, 2007).

Results and Significance
Our scan of selected journals and database queries yielded a total of 55 empirical peer-reviewed journal articles deemed appropriate for review. Five themes were evident in the reviewed studies; the studies focused on: pre-service teachers’ perceptions of and motivations for using social media (or not) in their student teaching; pre-service teachers’ development of content knowledge and reflective practices using social media tools; their development of informal learning networks (e.g., peer-to-peer and mentoring networks) via social media; and the design of formal, social media-enabled communities of practice. Implications for the design of future research and teacher preparation initiatives will be discussed in the final paper.

Author

• Christine M. Greenhow, Michigan State University