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

The Gathering

Vagle (2021) suggested P-IP researchers gather materials rather than data. This distinction is important in order to semantically separate research endeavors from qualitative, positivist perspectives about what researchers collect. Thus, I applied the term data gathering for this research work. Vagle (2018) suggested that phenomena determined “how it is to be studied” (p. 75) and described multiple data gathering moments including observations, writings, interviews, drawings, and music collected over a specified period of time. In fitting with the research topic, this method honoured the ethos of openness of OEPr, examinined the multiplicity of textual information, and revealed an openness in data gathering. Vagle (2018) suggested data moments could include arts-based methods such as drawings, paintings, photos, visuals, films, and performance art. Knowing that these were potential options did not mean that I would use all of these formats in my research.

          I planned the interview protocol (see Appendix D) to be fluid and flexible since unstructured interviews were the most common interview type in phenomenology due to their open dialogic nature (Kennedy, 2016; Vagle, 2018). Data gathering began with web searches of FoE sites for participant related information. Digital information originating from daily digital interactions by participants in online platforms were “extremely insightful to understand what digital actors ‘do’, rather than who they ‘are’” (Caliandro & Gandini, 2017). I searched for open sources of information, such as participants’ social media locations including blog sites, Twitter, Instagram, and course websites wherever these were posted openly on the internet. This information supported the focus and topics that I wove into the interview, often as a conversation prompt or question. Although information garnered from multiple web sources may reveal MDL in action, these data gatherings provided insights into the lived experiences, intentionalities, and digital identities of the participants.

          For my own processes in this research, I used a variety of digital technologies to manage and generate data gatherings. First, digital data analysis was done using NVivo on an Apple Macbook Pro laptop computer. I used Zoom video conferencing software to capture the interviews. The web-based audio transcription software Otter.ai generated drafts of the interview transcripts in a timely manner, sometimes allowing me to return transcripts within forty-eight hours to the participants. The web-based word cloud creation software WordArt was used to re-create the transcripts into graphic renderings. This was selected from the abundance of word cloud generators since I already had a free account with this service. This software allowed me to download a portable network graphic (PNG) image and provide a web-access link to the interactive word cloud image. I used the web-based open access software Draw.io for concept mapping since it integrated into an existing Google account. I used the graphic visualization software ProCreate on an iPad to generate sketchnotes of concepts and research findings.

          Since both digital and paper forms of research journals were fluid territories for me, I kept both versions of research journals to capture notes of my thoughts and observations. This included annotations, video recordings, and textual artifacts. I curated, stored, and organized notes within participant folders on my computer hard drive, on private blog posts, and posted thoughts on open blog posts when anonymity was maintained. 

          Notes and annotations for this research included jottings, descriptive observations of social media sites such as tweets and blog posts, and linkages recorded as marginalia on transcripts. Since jottings and cognitive connections occurred at any time, these were recorded at the time, place, and available media, indicative of the fluid nature of the research process. Saldaña (2016) suggested these private, personal, written and recorded musings become “question-raising, puzzle-piecing, connection-making, strategy-building, problem-solving, answer-generating, rising-above-the-data” heuristics (p. 44). I heeded Saldaña’s (2016) caution to not rely on “mental notes to self” (p. 45) as a method, and took advantage of the technologies at hand to capture my wonderings and wanderings along research paths. 

          Vagle (2018) suggested taking walks to provide time and space for phenomenological musings to occur. With the COVID-19 pandemic in full swing as I conducted the research, outdoor walks and bike rides not only provided time to think, or to NOT think, but also became an avenue for mental health and well-being during this research phase. In true P-IP fashion, the technology made me as researcher while I made notes about research data gatherings (see Figure 14). As the liveliness of my notes and musings also became data gatherings, these notes revealed the “affective or entangled engagements with materializations or textualualizations whether as a glow or a strange idea or an imaginative glimpse into a new becoming” (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2020, p. 22).

          Throughout the process of gathering these data materials, I created observational notes and began to establish preliminary connections to MDL frameworks. In the early stages of the research, I engaged with data making (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2020) in order to create dynamic representations for each participant. I created and revisited conceptual maps of connections, locations, and literacies using a variety of software in order to “animate new ways of thinking and relating by affirming heretofore unimagined configurations” (Ellingson & Sotirin, 2020, p. 11).

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