Humanizing Online Discourses of Collegiality in Teacher Education

• In Event: The Continuing and Renewed Urgency of Critical Digital Literacies: Ethical and Political Considerations on Research and Practice

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated experiments in virtual teaching, reinforcing the need for teacher education to align with humanizing goals that cherish criticality, responsiveness, and inclusivity (Brown, 2013). This study explores how Connected Learning (CL; Ito et al., 2013) in teacher education (CLinTE; Baker-Doyle, 2017) can be designed to better support humanizing discourses of collegiality online. We expand on previous research in which we identified educators’ emergent repertoires of practice in online interactions across three continua--sharing, care, and experimentation–characterizing more and less humanizing discourses of collegiality.

Theoretical Perspectives
We draw together: 1) Connected Learning (CL) values equity, full participation, and social connection (Ito, et al, 2013), values that undergird its design principles for leveraging technology for interest-driven learning. CL is organized around a shared purpose, is production-centered, and openly-networked (CLA, 2015). 2) We take the sociocritical construct ‘repertoires of practice’ (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003) to adults to understand teachers’ learning as emergent shared practice. 3) Collegiality involves knowledge-sharing to address problems of practice through emotional coping, social support, and humor (Mawhinney, 2008, 2010). Humanizing discourses of collegiality (Authors 7-9) extends to include critical care and reflexivity to (re)center mutual vulnerability alongside those oppressed in a dialectic process of reflection of action (Salazar, 2013).

Methods
We provide a comparative case study of two CLinTE experiences that vary in scope, participants, time, and design: Case 1 (n=12) includes international educators who self-selected to participate in a Massive Online Open Collaboration (MOOC), and Case 2 (n=10) involves preservice teachers enrolled in an educational technology course. Data collected included tweets from synchronous Twitter chats and written reflections. Processual case analysis (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2016) consisted of inductive coding and back-tracing from educators’ (n=21) written reflections to digitally networked activity via Twitter chats. To compare CL designs, we categorized designed elements (e.g. participation structures, activities, instructional practices) by CL principles and traced elements to emergent shared practice.

Findings
Similar to Mirra (2019) regarding teaching, we found in regards to CLinTE, the CL principles (Ito, et al. 2013) were not sufficient to support teachers in more critical and humanizing discursive collegial interactions online in a field that historically asks educators for compliance rather than ingenuity. Tracing the designed elements of both cases across the emergence of shared practices, we found designing for communal ethos particularly important to educators in supporting humanizing online discourses of collegiality.
For instance, “nervous” about joining a Twitter chat as a “newcomer to the community,” Jaye, a Case 1 participant was able to overcome “hurdles” alongside classmates and “enthusiastic,” welcoming digitally-networked colleagues who invited them to join in multiple ways. The affectively positive experience led them to conclude that the space was not “particularly hierarchical or exclusive.” Similarly, supported by a distributed facilitation design of the MOOC (facilitator roles rotated), through a series of invitations to each other a group of MOOC participants together created a critical turn in the kinds of media the community produced and shared. Evidence from these examples and further examples will be provided.

Authors

• Cherise McBride, University of California - Berkeley

• Anna Smith, Illinois State University

• Christopher Rogers, University of Pennsylvania