Media and digital literacies in Canadian teacher educators’ open educational practices: A post-intentional phenomenology

Appendix B

B.1 Email for Research Participation

Insert date.

Dear (Insert participant name),
My name is Helen DeWaard. I am a PhD candidate in the Joint PhD program in the Department of Education at the universities of Brock, Lakehead and Windsor, Ontario in the field of Cognition and Learning.

I am reaching out to you to invite you to participate in a study which explores teacher educators’ lived experiences with media and digital literacies from the perspective of an open educational practitioner in a Faculty of Education in Canada. This research project titled Critical media and digital literacies in the open educational practices of Canadian teacher educators: A post-intentional phenomenology is being conducted as part of my PhD research in the field of education.

In conducting this research, I am hoping to better understand how OEPr are impacted by critical media and digital literacies in teacher education, but also gain understanding in how open practices can be defined from a teacher educator’s lived experiences. This research may enhance current knowledge about the lived experiences of teacher educators in the acquisition and application of media and digital literacies within the field of teacher education in Canada. Since the onset of the pandemic, the need for media and digital literacies has been a prominent concern and this research will benefit all those who are currently teaching on Canadian faculties of education, and potentially for teacher educators in faculties of education globally.

Taking part in this study is voluntary.  Before you decide whether or not you would like to take part in this study, please read the attached Letter of Information for Research Participation carefully to understand what is involved. After you have read this information letter, please ask any questions you may have.

If you agree to participate, please RSVP and an informed consent form will be emailed to you. Please RSVP or send questions by email.

Sincerely,

Helen DeWaard
Lakehead University, Faculty of Education, Joint PhD student

B.2 Letter Before Informed Consent Form
Insert date, 2021.

Dear Potential Participant:
My name is Helen DeWaard. I am a PhD candidate in the Joint PhD program in the Department of Education at the universities of Brock, Lakehead and Windsor, Ontario in the field of Cognition and Learning. You are invited to participate in a study which explores teacher educators’ lived experiences with media and digital literacies from the perspective of an open educational practice (OEPr) in a Faculty of Education in Canada. This research project titled Critical media and digital literacies in the open educational practices of Canadian teacher educators: A post-intentional phenomenology is being conducted as part of my PhD research in the field of education.

Taking part in this study is voluntary.  Before you decide whether or not you would like to take part in this study, please read this letter carefully to understand what is involved.  After you have read this Letter of Information for Research Participation, please ask any questions you may have.

Purpose and Objectives
From my role as an instructor in a faculty of education and applying a teacher educator’s lens, I want to hear the stories of teacher educators who openly share, specifically how media and digital literacies impact or shape open educational practices (OEPr). The purpose of this research project is to explore the lived experiences with acquiring and applying media and digital literacies as a teacher educator who participates in OEPr. In conducting this research, I am hoping to better understand how OEPr are impacted by critical media and digital literacies in teacher education, but also gain understanding in how open practices can be defined from a teacher educator’s lived experiences.

This research will enhance current knowledge about the lived experiences of teacher educators in the acquisition and application of media and digital literacies within the field of teacher education in Canada. Since the onset of the pandemic, the need for media and digital literacies has been a prominent concern and this research will benefit all those who are currently teaching on Canadian faculties of education, and potentially for teacher educators in faculties of education globally.

I define open educational practices as collaborative pedagogies utilizing digital technologies and authentic learning encounters for “interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation, and empowerment of learners” (Cronin, 2017, p. 18). In other words, as a teacher educator, you will individually or collaboratively select open educational practices to support your ways of knowing, designing, planning, and assessing teaching and learning events (Cronin, 2017; Nascimbeni & Burgos, 2016; Paskevicius, 2017; Roberts, 2019).

The study is framed by the following research questions:Participant selection: As a potential participant, you are being asked to join in this study because you are within my known networks, through your research and scholarly works, and/or have been recommended through a snowball sampling. Your participation fits the criteria for this research because you are currently working, or have worked within the past five years, as a teacher educator in a Canadian faculty of education. During the initial contact and after returning the signed consent, you will be asked to share and confirm your active involvement in open educational practices. These may be evidenced through your open engagement and/or participation in any of the following: social media accounts, blog site, web available course materials such as syllabi and/or course website(s), and openly accessed web publications.

What is involved? If you consent to voluntarily participate in this research, your participation will include:As a researcher, I will review and analyze social media account contributions – those that you will identify to me during the interview and verify as examples of media and digital literacies and your open educational practice. More specifically, this will include your web publications that could be considered to be relevant to this research. This monitoring and analysis will be done for a two-week period following the interview. I will also review any course syllabi you are willing to share. You are welcome to submit any additional web resources or artifacts that you feel would be useful for this study. This information may reveal connections and applications of media and digital literacies of which you may be unaware. When this information is returned to you for review, this may result in deeper understanding of the impact of MDL in your open educational practices.

Risks
The study risks are minimal, although you may potentially feel some discomfort answering questions during the interview or preparing the phase two reflection. This discomfort is anticipated to be minimal and temporary. Any emotional or psychological harm is anticipated to be minimal since topics being discussed are not sensitive or invasive. This potential harm will be mitigated by providing alternative questions or topics that minimize discomfort, and by ensuring that you are informed that you can withdraw at any time during the data collection phase of this research.

Because the interview, transcription, and email communication will be conducted using digital tools, there is no guarantee that the data will not be intercepted by others, although this is unlikely since I will consistently use VPN protocols when using internet-based platforms.

This research will not place you in breach of relevant law. Any potential breach of relevant laws, such as a potential breach of copyright regulations, which you may reveal during the interview and data gathering, will be held in strictest confidence and not be explicitly revealed in the research dissemination.

Potential harm to your professional reputation and your data privacy will be minimized by the use of pseudonyms and digitally created avatar images that will be attached to any reported data and information. Where the data may potentially be identifiable, since specific details you share may be readily available and searchable on the internet, this will be further anonymized and aggregated to prevent potential recognition.

Benefits
The potential benefit to you as a participant could be that you gain greater awareness of the field of media and digital literacies in general, as well as some of the frameworks that identify skills and competencies within media and digital literacy acquisition. This research may also benefit you in gaining personal and professional awareness of your professional skills, fluencies, and competencies within the areas of media and digital literacies, as well as insights into how these influence your open educational practice.

Further to this personal and professional benefit that you may gain, this research may benefit others who are currently teaching in faculties of education by identifying areas of professional growth, and for leaders in faculties of education to identify potential areas of professional development for new and current faculty members.

This research may additionally contribute to the growing body of work in the area of open educational practices within teacher education. This research can potentially identify issues and benefits of acquiring media and digital literacies that may advance the work of those who teach and learn within open educational contexts in higher education.

Rights of Participation
You are under no obligation to participate, and are free to withdraw at any time during the data collection phase, without prejudice to pre-existing entitlements. Your decision to participate will not affect your academic status or employment. You will be given, in a timely manner throughout the course of the research project, information that is relevant to your decision to continue or withdraw from participation. You will be given information on your rights as a participant to request the withdrawal of data, including any limitation on the feasibility of that withdrawal, should it be requested after the data collection phase is completed.

Compensation
As a way of recognizing your gift of time for this research and to acknowledge any inconvenience related to your participation, you will be offered a $25 Chapters/Indigo gift card, should you complete any or all parts of the outlined research phases. If you consent to join in this study, this form of compensation must not be considered coercive or as payment for your time.

Confidentiality and Anonymity
Your reputation and privacy will be protected by the use of pseudonyms and digitally created avatar images that will anonymously represent any reported data, artifacts, and information. This will ensure anonymity of your contributions within publications emerging from this research, including the dissertation document. Since your identity will be known to me, as the researcher, the information you share during this research will be held in the strictest of confidence. Where the data may potentially be identifiable beyond anonymity, since specific details that you may share could be readily available and searchable on the internet since you are sharing your open education practices, data will be further anonymized through de-identifiable word usage and the aggregation of information, to prevent potential recognition.

Should you wish to have your identity revealed in the research publication and dissemination, an additional consent form will be provided in order to acquire your informed and written permission. This will be collaboratively written to include your specific preferences and will explicitly outline the precise criteria, constraints and considerations of this open contribution to research.

Access to Information and Publication of Results
As this is part of my PhD research, you should be aware that the research data and the analysis information will be discussed and potentially shared with my dissertation committee, as part of their monitoring and support of this research endeavour. Primary publication of research results will be done within the final dissertation submission and pending the PhD defence presentation. Subsequent publication of research results will be done in peer reviewed journals, web publications, and social media locations. Confidentiality and anonymity will be maintained within any future publications emerging from this research.

During the research phases, the storage of data and information will be located on my password protected laptop and a password protected and encrypted external storage device. Upon completion of this research, the data and information will be stored on a password protected and encrypted external hard drive, stored in a secure location at Lakehead University, Faculty of Education, Orillia, Ontario for a period of five years.

Consent
Your informed consent to join in this research is completely voluntary and can be withdrawn at any time during the data collection phase. I have prepared a short video as a way to introduce myself and provide information about this research project [link to video: https://stepbystep.hjdewaard.ca/blog/recruitment-and-informed-consent/]. Once you have reviewed the video and this documentation and are willing to participate you are asked to kindly email to request an informed consent for participation form. Additionally, and subsequent to the signed consent being returned, I will review the consent form with you at the time of the interview.

Prior to recording the interview, I will seek your verbal consent to record the interview, as well as remind you that you can opt not to answer any of the questions or withdraw from the interview at any time. I will store the interview recording and transcription on my own password secure laptop. The interview transcript and subsequent data information will be handled with anonymity and shared back to you for review.

Should you not wish to participate, no further action is required, and you will not be contacted further. As a participant, you can withdraw from this research at any time during the data collection phase, either by email or phone call, or during the interview. If they do withdraw, any information collected will be removed from consideration in this research, if done prior to the report writing phase of the dissertation process.

An informed consent form will be emailed and can be returned by email. Questions about this research can be directed as outlined below.

Contact Information:
Helen DeWaard can be contacted at any time by email [redacted], by direct message on Twitter [redacted], or by phone at [redacted].
This research is being conducted under the supervision of Dr. Michael Hoechsmann, Associate Professor, Lakehead Faculty of Education, Orillia. You may contact my supervisor by email at [redacted].
This research study has been reviewed and approved by the Lakehead University Research Ethics Board.  If you have any questions related to the ethics of the research and would like to speak to someone outside of the research team, please contact Sue Wright at the Research Ethics Board at 807-343-8283 or research@lakeheadu.ca.


Sincerely,

Helen DeWaard
Lakehead University, Faculty of Education, Joint PhD student

B.3 Post-interview email

Hi xx,

I can't thank you enough for adding your voice to this research. I've listened to our interview twice now and continue to hear 'anew' some of the insights you've provided. 

I have attached the transcript which included some key words, a link to the audio version of the interview, and the word cloud that was generated from this transcript. The interactive version of the word cloud will be available for the next two weeks in case you want to take a closer look.

As a follow-up, I'd like you to reflect on your media and digital literacies potentially in relation to elements in any of the frameworks that can support your reflections, and then create an artifact that may focus on your open educational practice. You can select one or more of the frameworks here, or pull ideas from any of these frameworks that you feel are representative of your lived experiences with media and digital literacies in your open educational practices.If you have any additional thoughts or want to respond to that provocation from the interview when I shared the media triangle, please share them in any way you wish (text, audio, video, image, graphic) or just email me any thoughts!

So, if you could create and share your digital artifact within the next two weeks, depending on your schedule, that would be great. I'll set a 'soft deadline' for xx date and will send a reminder at the end of next week in case you need one.

Looking forward to this reflection.

Helen DeWaard
 


 

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