Is the Medium the Message? Video-Recording and Writing for Approximations of Practice

• In Event: Opportunities and Challenges Associated With Approximations of Practice in Teacher Education Programs

Abstract

The net worth of Salman Khan, and the complaints of academic faculty heard around the world in Spring of 2020, have at least one factor in common: the real differences in video as compared to written content. For prospective teachers, too, in the context of approximations of practice, such a difference may exist. The purpose of the study reported in this paper is to investigate differences in how prospective teachers may decompose and recompose practice during video and written approximations of practice. By written approximation of practice, we refer to a response to an assignment such as producing (parts of) a lesson plan; by video approximation of practice, we refer to a response to an assignment such as video recording oneself responding to a (hypothetical) student.
We draw on the perspectives of social constructivism and systemic functional linguistics. Like Tzur (2001), we posit “the centrality of social interaction to the very process of reflection” and “the rejection a positivistic view of the mind and epistemological emphasis of the role of human experience in the formation of knowledge” (p. 261). Following systemic functional linguistics, we view language as having metafunctions: ideational, which among other features shows one’s interpretation of logical relations; interpersonal, to enact interpersonal relations; and textual, to create the words (or diagrams) used (Halliday, 1985).
We examined a purposive set of 20 written and 20 video approximations of practice produced by 20 prospective teachers, selected by pre- and post-assessment performance on an instrument validated to measure mathematical knowledge for teaching (Mohr-Schroeder et al., 2017). We designed prompts for written and video approximations to enact the same teaching practice (providing feedback to students), while addressing the same particular mathematical content (definitions of geometric transformations). Similar sample student work was provided for both. In our analysis of these approximations of practice, we focused on ideational metafunction: how the prospective teachers may have construed relations among different components of the focal teaching practice, such as attending to student work, interpreting the student work, and advancing the students’ thinking.
We argue that attending to potential differences in video and written approximations of practice is critical to developing prospective teachers’ capacity for recomposing teaching practice. In particular, written approximations of practice may constrain teachers’ capacity, while video approximations may open teachers’ capacity. In our analysis, prospective teachers were more likely to compartmentalize components of teaching practice in written approximations of practice, such as communicating their responses in bullet points, without explicit references to components placed before or after. However, in video approximations of practice, teachers were more likely to weave the components fluidly, making references to each other.
Rougée and Herbst (2018), in comparing storyboarding to written text, suggested that different media have different affordances for teacher education. Our study adds to the compelling case that the medium impacts the message, that is, how prospective teachers’ construal of practice may be contingent on the medium in which they do so.

Authors

• Yvonne Lai, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Alyson E. Lischka, Middle Tennessee State University

• Jeremy Strayer, Middle Tennessee State University