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

COVID-19

This global pandemic began in early 2020 with widespread respiratory illness and death resulting from the COVID-19 virus. The pandemic resulted in widespread shutdown of travel, mass gatherings, impacting how schools and higher education institutions operated. The rapid pivot to online instruction impacted the delivery of education and created a global need for educators to become proficient with the use of technology to provide learning opportunities for students.

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Rationale 18 key elements that led me to this research plain 2023-10-30T14:38:54+00:00
Educational issues resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic heightened awareness of the need for literate and digitally proficient individuals within every facet of the education sector. In my role as a learning designer and teacher educator in Canadian faculties of education (FoE), my lived experience is immersed into my work designing logistical and navigational elements for teaching within digitally enabled learning environments. Rapid emergency online instruction (Hodges et al., 2020), around the clock media consumption focusing on educational deficit narratives, and ongoing changes in digital technologies and expectation are shaping the push for the development of global competencies (CMEC, 2020).

Prior to, and emerging from the global pandemic, the need for an informed and technologically prepared teaching workforce is identified in policy and position papers nationally and globally:
- the United Nations Leading Sustainable Development Goals - Education 2030 (United Nations, 2015) report establishes teacher education as one of the priorities in the achievement of sustainable development goals;
- the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) continues to examine policies and practices for media and information literacies (Singh et al., 2016), digital citizenship (Law et al., 2018), and open educational resources (Sobe, 2022; UNESCO, 2019), and information and communication technology competencies in teacher development (UNESCO, 2022, 2023);
- the push for open educational resources (UNESCO, 2019) and open access extends through the open consultation process by an international commission from UNESCO on the Futures of Education which highlights the need to "mobilize the many rich ways of being and knowing in order to leverage humanity’s collective intelligence" (UNESCO, 2019, paragraph "The aim ...");
- the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) researches and documents the need for teachers to be “high-level knowledge workers who constantly advance their own professional knowledge as well as that of their profession” (Schleicher, 2012, p. 108) noting that the demands on teachers are continuing to increase (Schleicher, 2018);
- a position paper from the European Literacy Policy Network indicates that teachers may “lack competence, confidence and knowledge of effective strategies to harness the potential of diverse technologies to enhance digital literacy teaching and learning” (Lemos & Nascimbeni, 2016, p. 3);
- the U.S. Department of Educational Technology released the document Advancing Educational Technology in Teacher Preparation: Policy Brief (Stokes-Beverley & Simoy, 2016); and,
- in Canada, the Canadian government report Democracy Under Threat (Zimmer, 2018) outlines the need to address education of digital literacies. The Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (2020) provides a systems-level framework for global competencies which further drives the transformation of the educational agenda in Canada (CMEC, 2020a). The Digital Learning in Canada in 2022 report identifies digital literacies as a pressing issue (Irhouma & Johnson, 2022).
These identified needs from global and national levels are ever more pressing during current priorities for online and remote educational instruction. I suggest that pressures resulting from the pandemic will continue to push the field of teacher education and the application of media and digital literacies (MDL ) within FoE into the forefront. Yet the field of teacher education, and more specifically the MDL of those who teach in FoE from an open educational stance, remains a misunderstood and ignored field of endeavour. This research will add insights into the impact of these influences and pressures on teaching and learning within teacher education programs since these are rarely researched.

These are not new issues, despite the many changes that occurred in the light of the response of educational systems, particularly in FoE, to the global health crises precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, these are not new issues. Along with a public outcry for media literacies in the face of fake news (Singh et al., 2016) and increasing demands for technologically and digitally literate populations, there is a push to change teacher education generally and the teaching practices of those who teach in teacher educator programs more specifically (Beck, 2016; Ellis & McNicholl, 2015; Foulger et al., 2017; Stillman et al., 2019). Connected to this issue is the revitalization of teacher education programs in order to “prepare teachers who will teach in transformative ways and leverage technology as a problem-solving tool” (Schmidt-Crawford et al., 2018, p. 132). The paucity of research relating to the MDL work of teacher educators practicing in open educational spaces is a disadvantage when evidence for the effectiveness of educational practices is increasingly demanded (Beck, 2016).

It is in this context, from my lived experiences as a teacher educator and learning designer in Canadian faculties of education that my investigations were shaped. My purpose for this research was to add to the corpus of research focusing on teacher educators and aims to expand understanding of open educational practices (OEPr) from teacher educator's contexts by examining the lived experiences of teacher educators who reveal their teaching practices openly, with a specific focus on their understanding and practice of media and digital literacies. I intentionally selected Canadian FoE since this was contextually familiar and where I engaged and share materials openly within my professional learning networks. I initially considered conducting the research to only include Ontario FoE but realized I may not find enough participants that fit the established criteria within that limited context. Limiting the participant pool would also exclude some of the voices in Canadian open educational contexts that I hoped to include in the research. Although I understood that each FoE in Canada is unique, it was this dissimilarity that I hoped would add nuance and richness to the lived experiences of the participants. I also considered global FoE contexts but determined that this wider scope would hinder the research; the extent of the dissimilarities would interfere with finding commonalities in the stories of lived experiences within MDL in the OEPr of TEds in FoE. These delimiting factors helped me frame the research questions.