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

Dimension 4.1

Criticality in the selection of tools, technologies, spaces, and places

Careful and reasoned examinations of software and hardware for pedagogical applications for use in FoE are not often conducted by faculty but by technology support staff or purchasing agents. For many participants in this research, their OEPr includes criticality through self-reflection and examination of platform technologies for “predictive logics and commercial interests … which can work against their pedagogical values and commitments” (Nichols et al., 2021, p. 348). Platforms are defined as both infrastructures upon which applications are constructed and operated, as well as the “online networks that facilitate economic and social exchanges” (Nichols et al., 2021, p. 345). For participants in this research, their MDL within their OEPr includes a critical examination of platforms, tools and technologies not just for technical construction or socio-economic dimensions, as suggested by Nichols et al., (2021) but also for pedagogical applications. Criticality of tools and technologies is evident in UF’s questions relating to platform capitalism and SH’s comments of technological architectures that embed market logics to perpetuate attentional economies. For LV and CS, this criticality includes decisions relating to tools and technologies for the curation and aggregation of student work with a view toward tech agnosticism. 

          Implicit in the findings of participants’ lived experiences with platforms and technologies are critical approaches that examine hereditary concepts of MDL that spotlight the integrations of users, technologies, and content into educational contexts and distributed within “technical infrastructures and socio-economic relations” (Nichols & Stornaiuolo, 2019, p. 14). For example, RB and UF question the impact and efficacy of integrating social media into course designs, AT and PL examine the synchronous or asynchronous delivery of content and connections in light of pandemic teaching and learning structures, OW questions the purpose for video captured lectures viewed from the perspective as a barrier for engagement, and SH and LL’s critical analysis of the use of video-conferencing for classes and seminars (Nichols & Stornaiuolo, 2019).
Participants in this research share their critical approaches to analyzing spaces and places for learning engagement. Nichols et al., 2021 suggest that criticality in MDL is helpful in identifying and analyzing digital practices, in order to contribute to a “wider repertoire of tactics for mapping, critiquing, and transforming digital ecosystems” (p. 345) that has implications for teaching and practice. For ER, SH, OW, RB, and UF this means explicitly teaching students to identify invasive forms of digital and media ownership and governance that infiltrate and underpin the technologies being used in the education sector (Nichols & Stornaiuolo, 2019).

          Criticality involves the creation of spaces for building knowledge, particularly within the Canadian faculties of education (FoE) explored through the lived experiences of the TEds in this research, that is grounded in the labour of marginalized communities while interrogating where people in positions of power inadvertently or intentionally erase the knowledge work created, as suggested by Collier and Lohnes-Watulak (Mackenzie et al., 2021). This is of particular importance in light of efforts to address and respond to issues identified in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action (2015). Opportunities to remix while producing multimedia in courses in the FoE offers student a creative way to show what they know, thus “troubling the traditional definitions of academic authorship and knowledge … these new forms could validate understandings rooted in communities of colour, indigenous communities, and queer communities” (Mackenzie et al., 2021, p. 310). Opportunities for marginalized populations to share their stories as modelled in FoE, can shape the way TEds and TCs address concerns relating to access, equity, indigeneity, diversity, and marginalization. This echoes how criticality is applied to expressions of social imaginaries, described as the shared collections of artefacts, images and sounds constituting the representational milieu within which individuals give and receive communicated knowledge (Wallis & Rocha, 2022).

          For the TEds in this research, this approach to criticality includes questioning and examining the tools, technologies, spaces, and places where teaching and learning occur, not only for their own courses, but also within the schools into which their TCs deploy. This is evident in SH’s experiences with critical approaches to the video enabled teaching spaces resulting from COVID pandemic teaching, AT’s efforts to engage marginalized Muslim-Canadian’s voices in video storytelling, and ER’s critical views of learning management systems (LMS) when sharing experiences of students using Discord for course communication since the “LMS discussion forum is a place where ideas go to die”.

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