Contribution to TEds
Contribution to the study of teacher education
Teaching in teacher education is a complex task (Livingston, 2017). Through this research I recognize and emphasize this complexity in the art and science of teaching (see Figure 2, see Figure 3). Teaching encompasses diverse factors relating to design, content, assessment, sociality, technology, community, and cognition. Elements and dispositions include patience, compassion, tenacity, character, pleasure, learning, authority, ethics, order, and imagination (Banner & Cannon, 2017/1997). By considering these factors as being relevant to the lived experiences of TEds in Canadian FoE contributes to the value that should be considered in the profession.With the creation of the gyroscopic image (see Figure 22) comes a second contribution to the study of teacher education, as this complex navigational aid can be applied to the management of the ever-shifting terrain of teacher education. Through this remixed image, focusing on the infusion of MDL into an OEPr, I contribute to the technological dimension of specificity and salience (Scott, 2014). Specificity is evident in the key elements that emerge from the participants’ efforts to communicate, connect, create and become a critical emitter and receptor of media and digital processes and productions in their work as teacher educators. Salience is the noticing of information that is notable (Scott, 2014). This is evident in the gyroscopic navigational image where I place the teacher educator in the center of the image, surrounded by the moving parts representing their MDL within an OEPr. In this way, the centrality of teacher educators in this research is recognized.
While the main focus of this research is grounded in the work of teacher educators, this work can support the infusion of MDL into other areas of study in teacher education or broader higher education contexts. For 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.
This doctoral inquiry and resulting research contribute to explorations into the complex and diverse practices of teacher educators (see Figure 23). This research contributes to discourse on MDL practices which 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).