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

Data Analysis - Facet One

Becoming a Teacher Educator

“Education is not an affair of ‘telling’ and being told, but an active and constructive process.” John Dewey

From the lived experiences shared by the fourteen participants, I illuminated participants’ human endeavours of becoming teacher educators. Their journeys resonate through these anecdotes. This is the first facet in the data gatherings that I scrutinized in an effort to answer my research questions. Images of teacher education emerged from these reflections of the participant’s lived experiences. By glancing through this facet, I learned more about the essence and intentionality of the participants. Relationships with technology and with the world in which they teach became apparent. For a clearer understanding of defining characteristics of teacher education, it was helpful to review the literature for this concept (see Teacher Education section). Keeping participants' pseudonyms and avatar images in mind became necessary (see Figure 19).
          Eleven of the participants had foundations in the field of education, having gone through a teacher education program and worked as a teacher in K-12 education. Fields of interest varied from science (Rigel), social studies (Aquila), physical education (Carina), and language and literacy (Dorado, Leonis, Orion). Two participants related their experiences as second language learners which they indicated had influence over their work as teacher educators (Merak, Vega). Two commented on the impact of being a first-generation post-secondary school attender (Perseus, Vega).  For six of the participants, becoming a teacher educator was a natural progression emerging out of their PhD level graduate studies and dissertation work (Aquila, Carina, Dorado, Izar, Lyra, Merak). Others transitioned into teacher education through Masters graduate studies (Merak, Perseus, Polaris). For some, the shift to teacher education happened when their own children were born (Andromeda, Leonis, Lyra, Rigel, Vega). 

I taught for almost a decade, and I had two children, and took a different look at education … I went back and did graduate work around the sort of questions that I was seeing when I was teaching. So, most of my research is built on, I wonder questions (Carina).

           Three participants created and designed new graduate level programs and courses within their faculties of education (Carina, Lyra, Orion). Most participants shared experiences of designing learning and curricula within their faculty programs that reflected current educational trends and infuse technologies (Andromeda, Aquila, Leonis, Perseus, Polaris, Sabik, Vega). 

Right now, I'm trying to figure out how to develop some kind of tool, so children can put images online and share them with each other and talk about them in the way that we do on Instagram, or Facebook or something like that. So, I'm trying to deal with the ethical challenges around that (Dorado).

Several participants noted their role as leading edge innovators in online course design (Andromeda, Aquila, Izar, Orion, Vega) which inspired their open learning practices. Others disclosed their feelings of responsibility to share their experience and expertise, not only with their students but with colleagues and others around the world. 

I think it’s largely educators have that philosophy at their core. It's about, you know, spreading knowledge and sharing ideas and inspiring minds. And whether that's through a great story or a fantastic open resource that you share. I mean, the reach is further, if you can do things digitally and see some of the impact you're having. But I think that philosophy has been there for a long time amongst educators (Izar).

Fundamentally, my lived experience has grown to recognize that I've got a responsibility too. I am a public servant. And so, for me, I do feel that I've got a responsibility to the public, I serve to ensure that the work I'm doing is openly accessible (Vega).

With schools and schooling framed from perspectives of knowledge scarcity and the “technology of the book” (Lyra), participants worked within their experiences to push understandings of knowledge abundance and teaching with digital and electronic technologies. This required ongoing learning and reflective practice. From their lived experiences, the participants revealed that their own ongoing professional learning journeys, particularly when developing technology related skills, were predominantly informal and self-taught, often done through web searches, trial and error, or exploration:

I don't make a big mess or anything. It's just like, oh, that doesn't really work the way I want. So, I just try something else. You know, once you get the standard layout of most software, there's going to be a menu, there's going to be the things you need, try them out, see what you want to do (Rigel).

Participants mentioned that their learning happened serendipitously through connections, research projects, or conference attendance. Many pointed out that they explicitly and implicitly passed this learning on to their students through the courses they taught. Although one person specifically noted their intentional stance as a learner, this outlook can be seen as a tacit feature of other participants’ ongoing learning:

I think that it's a lot of learning on my own, and then trying to leverage that. I've always positioned myself as a learner in those contexts with my students. I think in some ways, it's helpful that I … have that kind of learner perspective with them as we're working (Merak).

Proficiency and interest in applying technology to teaching and learning was evident in the lived experiences shared by most, but not all of the participants. These experiences in using technologies as a teacher educator were lived through and any reluctance or phobia to technologies are overcome. One participant shared their curiosity:

Much of that was certainly informal. I was always a little bit adept and interested in educational technologies. And so, I remember, you know, my curiosity and seeing some of the value in, for example, I remember like in my grad studies early on wanting to present kind of multimodal papers and wanting to remix images, or add video (Merak).

Yet another shared their initial reluctance in using digital tools in their teaching: 

I was technophobic, I had no interest in digital technologies … I don't like playing games on the computer, had no interest really and I wasn’t super comfortable with digital tools (Polaris).

One participant suggested a need for teacher educators to take a stronger stance toward teaching from a critical disposition that was grounded in current research, particularly in the face of political agendas that opt to define digital literacies from a focus on job-readiness skills. Another mentioned the importance of: 

community consultations, professional learning networks and knowledge mobilization strategies, where we lean on collaborations for educational research, what we can learn from that, but also what educational researchers can learn from people, from teachers and principals and school board directors, to try to kind of address some of that in the programming for teacher education, and that would include technology (Vega).

The participants’ lived experiences included becoming, and modelling for their students how to become, a connected and networked educator. Although this facet amended the work of becoming a teacher educator, it was also evident in the participants’ OEPr. 

I encourage open, collaborative, networked learning in digital spaces because I believed, in past, that learning to participate online and adopting an open disposition can bring educators together around ideas, promote professional learning, and a sense of agency in digital environments (Perseus, digital artifact).

With these anecdotes there was evidence of various common elements within the lived experiences of the teacher educators who participated in this research. The commonalities illuminated some specific facets of becoming a teacher educator – foundational experiences and awareness of the field of education, building a teaching practice grounded in research relating to teaching practices, bringing personal interests in specific subject matter into the field of education, developing program and course designs through iteration and student feedback, and being positioned as a life-long learner.

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