Contributions
This research, by sharing how TEds infuse MDL in their OEPr, contributes to media education research. Just as McLuhan’s tetrad proposes, in the lived experiences of the participants in this research, with every medium and message for media production within their OEPr, there is not only enhancement and retrieval, there is also reversal and obsolescence (McLuhan & McLuhan, 1988). This research confirms what Buckingham (2019) suggests, that media in education is shaped by “purposeful, critical use … of communication” (p. 115). This is less about learning technical skills and fluencies, and more about deeper awareness of critical aspects of media – “media language, representation, production, and audience” (Buckingham, 2019, p. 58).
While the main focus of this research is in the field of teacher education, this work can support the infusion of MDL into other fields of study in higher education. As an example, one extension of this doctoral inquiry is exemplified by my supporting work with students in the application of e-portfolios into the faculty of education with a focus on introducing and building MDL into the lived experiences of students and faculty. My contribution to practice also includes the open thesis work done as part of the GO-GN wiki-scholars work. This doctoral inquiry and resulting research contribute to explorations into the complex and diverse practices of teacher educators while modelling how MDL practices are not divided “according to binary oppositions, but instead moves fluidly between the ethical and the personal; the objective and the subjective; the creative and the critical. Practices spread across digital contexts and include social, cultural and political elements” (Pangrazio, 2016 p. 168).
This dissertation research makes an original contribution to knowledge in several ways. The conceptual analysis of media and digital skills, fluencies, competencies and literacies support a shifting conception and builds an understanding of what being literate means – this will impact the ongoing applications and calls for literacies in multiple and varied fields of endeavour. Adding the gyroscopic image to the complex and ever shifting terrain of teacher education when infusing MDL into an OEPr contributes a remixed imagining of the teacher educator at the center, yet not solely central, to the efforts to communicate, connect, create and become critical emittor and receptor of media and digital processes and productions.
In turn, contributions to scholarly works that have been shaped by this doctoral inquiry, and in turn reciprocally shape this dissertation, include peer reviewed publications and chapters focusing on digital literacies across Canada (DeWaard & Hoechsmann, 2021), digital literacies in faculties of education in Canada (DeWaard, 2023), cross-cultural mentoring in professional learning (DeWaard & Chavhan, 2022), online course design (van Barneveld & DeWaard, 2021), assessment practices (DeWaard & Roberts, 2022), intentional open learning design (Roberts, Havemann & DeWaard, in press), and educommunication (DeWaard, in press),