Crystallizing Some Final Thoughts
“ For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning." T. S. Elliot
In this research, I focus on the lived experiences of teacher educators in Canadian faculties of education in an effort to clarify facets of their media and digital literacies that impact their open educational practices. As the T. S. Elliot quote reminds me, this ending is but the beginning, where the words and stories shared by the participants are becoming new stories, conceivably shaped by my renditions. In the literature review section I explore theoretical and conceptual foundations to teacher education, media and digital literacies, and open educational practices while examining post-intentional phenomenology. In the research design section I share the application of post-intentional phenomenology and crystallization methodology to my research, while revealing details of the methods including participant selection, timelines, interview procedures, and data gathering strategies. In the findings, I hold up facets of the stories shared by the participants and in the discussion section I re-examine the findings through selected lenses of MDL frameworks. In this conclusion I draw upon the previous sections to present implications of this research, limitations to consider, and the potential for future research emerging from this work, followed by a summation of the dissertation.Lived experiences are storied and as stories do, they contain heroes and protagonists. These stories include sites of struggle, loss of innocence, a heroic quest, companions along the way, trials and tribulations, with insight and transformations along the route taken toward resolution (Brown & Moffett, 1999). The lived experiences of the participants in this research are no less heroic for their efforts to bring media and digitally enabled educational practices into the open. It is through these efforts to communicate, connect, teach creatively, and enact criticality that MDL are becoming evident in the OEPr of TEds in Canadian FoE and beyond. The global push for OER, OEP, and OEPr, particularly as the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of MDL has become increasingly emphasized (UNESCO??; citations needed). Within teacher education, as evident in the lived experiences of the participants, awareness of OEPr is key, re-visioning is essential, and re-imagining futures will emerge.
While some advocate for separation of media from digital, I petition for a combinatorial view of MDL as a wholistic response to what is a complex and often chaotic concept. By sharing these lived experiences, as captured within the gyroscopic imagining, the individual facets can become the focus, while understanding that complexity surrounds each individual’s practices of teaching in the open. The participants’ lived experiences with MDL in their OEPr is shaped by a “base level of digital competence, defined as the confident, critical and responsible use of, and engagement with, digital technologies for learning, at work, and for participation in society” (Redecker & Punie, 2017, p. 107). What has become clearer through this research is the continuum(s) along which participants dial up or dial down their focus on specific facets of MDL as they design student learning and engage in scholarship as open educators (see Figure 5). The participants actively negotiate elements of knowledge production and dissemination, for themselves and their students, in order to “become consciously inclusive, socially and culturally diverse, interdisciplinary and inter-professional, and are able to foster communication, collaboration, ownership and mutual learning” (UNESCO, 2021, p. 127).
For the participants, all of whom come from a diverse background in teaching and teacher education with many holding years of experience as K-12 educators, their lived experiences with MDL are grounded in pedagogical and cognitive practices within the field of education in the higher education with deeply held connections to K-12 education. The collective expertise of the participants is not directly tied to any fields of study relating to media studies, media education, digital technologies, or open education.
The MDL within the participants’ OEPr support the findings of (Cronin, 2017), Paskevecius (2018), and Oddone (2019). Cronin (2017) identifies four elements of open educational practices including balancing privacy and openness, developing digital literacies, valuing social learning, and challenging traditional teaching roles and expectations. Paskevecius’ (2018) research identifies three categories of openness, which can be seen as sites where MDL contributes to OEPr, in explorations of open resources, engagements with open design tools and techniques, and open publications that engage in reflection, peer-review and contributions to knowledge building. Similar to Paskevicius’ findings, I see the lived experiences of the participants’ MDL in their OEPr as varied, responsive, complex, and not tied to the use of OER as primary teaching materials. The participants model and enact the call from Inamorato dos Santos (2019) who suggests that acquiring a capacity for openness is a “complex task, and that academics need to start from their teaching practices in order to find ways in which they can share and collaborate openly, through a mindset shift (p. 108).