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

Facet 3.1: Communication

Participants viewed communication as being predominantly web-based, particularly in light of COVID-19 responses, with options of being open to others. Their awareness of media related factors in their communication practices, such as audience, ethics, and data management, were evident in their shared stories. Andromeda, Aquila, Izar, Perseus, Orion, Rigel, and Vega reflected on how communication, particularly for their students, needed to extend beyond the physical classroom, through the use of a variety of digital tools, resources, and activities. For a full list of these digital tools, as mentioned by participants, see Appendix F. For Izar, this included students’ work on blogs:

…they're working in WordPress, developing reflections based on the course material, personal project inquiry that they document. And then they do a final presentation that's often shared there as well. But all of those things, you can make the whole site private, or you make it just visible to our course community, or you can make individual posts or pages private. And so, they get to see all the different ways they can permeate while still working in the web (Izar)

Experiences with online web-publication work with students became ubiquitous. With OEPr during the pandemic, Carina stated “digital communication has become mainstream” and suggested this helped increase feelings of fluency and competence since students were immersed within wider audiences. Andromeda took a critical stance toward communication, asking students to examine media messages for validity by interrogating “…is this a valid source? Kind of what makes it valid? What are they citing? How do I know that this information is true?”. For Vega open communication was identified as a duty and calling: “I'm hired as an educational researcher here, theorist. I'm supposed to be working on behalf of Canadian citizens. And so how can I create communication ecosystems so that they can access some of the work?” Communication was an essential component of the participants’ lived experiences with MDL in their teaching practice.

Audience

One participant pondered the need for an audience for their communicational practices. Other participants questioned who the audience was when creating media and digital communications for their own and their students’ purposes, even identifying self-as-audience. For Rigel this extended to ensure that “the purpose that you're doing it is not just performative for the whole world that you actually are doing it because students will feel the value”. For Vega this meant recognizing “… your audiences. If we're talking about access, I think you need to recognize who's, which audiences are you trying to communicate with, and then how accessible in terms of have open access is what you're trying to communicate”. Lyra suggested keeping audience in mind when making critical decisions about “what you're comfortable sharing and what you're not comfortable sharing”. 

          Rigel commented on their practice of flipping between an audience that involves students, the audience of colleagues, or communicating on the open web to unknown external others. This practice required a flexible approach to communicating with media and digital resources and suggested to students and colleagues that they: 

start where you are, there's little things you can do. To get to get there, you don't have to be perfect and polished at the end, it's just sort of like, we're really, let's go back to the purpose. So, if you can communicate effectively, and use a little piece of media, beyond like walls of text, let's think about what that could look like (Rigel).

For Dorado this included a continuum of MDL ranging from simple to complex in their attempts to build a relationship with the intended audience, one that emerged as visceral and multimodal.

Ethical Practice

Some of the ethical challenges in communication practices, as experienced by the participants, included contending with decisions such as where, when, how, and with whom to share. Explicit communication of ethical practices with students was a common thread throughout many of the participants’ lived experiences. Aquila’s statement was reflective of many others that share this perspective: 

I’m sort of future centric and tech centric, or future leaning, but I have a very strong foundations perspective as well. So, this is really important, because it's really the center of all these things, because we can't use technology without that ethical lens, without understanding the techno-colonialist implications of our technology (Aquila).

In reflecting on the work of teacher educators, for Lyra this meant “bringing people along, in a good way, and in an ethical way, because yes, they're, you know, they are grappling with some major shifts in the long held, deeply held ideas about learning”. Carina was not the only participant to note that they brought ethical issues into classroom conversations: “we talk about the ethical issues, and we look at AI and big data and algorithms”. Vega presented the concept of “ethical relationality … coming from the work that that I've done with different First Nation or international indigenous music”, outlining that communication and access required an understanding of the ethics of sharing and relationships. For many of the participants, the ethical issues surrounding digital and media communications are contingent on developing “open teaching practices that centre ethical, relational, linguistic and cultural perspectives” (Perseus). 

          One prominent ethical issue was that of copyright and the legal use of media and digital resources, not only for themselves as teacher educators, but for their students’ explicit awareness and intentions when ethically using materials in their teaching practice. Andromeda mentioned efforts to be “careful about the legally binding barriers that I have to model and also show respect for”. Sabik’s reflections echoed those in Lyra’s experiences when they signified that 

… when I ask students to create a blog and start posting their ideas openly, I have to ethically also engage them in conversations about the difference between submitting an assignment to me that's private, the other students don't even see it, versus putting something on a website that the world can see, and how that influences the communication? (Lyra)

Izar expressed that:

especially as a teacher, as a content creator, working in a way that makes good use of actually seeing media literacy is quite different … to consider how selecting an openly licensed or copyrighted resource impacts our learners and what they can therefore do to demonstrate their learning and/or curate the materials for future use. 

Izar also mentioned issues around copyright and digital rights management that impacted the use and access of teaching materials, since DRM constrain by imposing restrictions through purchase, loan, lease, or borrowing requirements.

For Rigel, copyright meant a shift in thinking about personal ownership: 

I've always sort of resonated with the fact there, the premise that it was like, you can release your images under Creative Commons … that's one of my motivations is releasing it all under Creative Commons so people can start thinking about these ideas that are complex in maybe simplified ways.

This mirrored Orion’s conversations about applying explicit approaches to the use of Creative Commons licensing on course materials and student coursework productions. From these lived experiences, the consideration of ethical issues and use of Creative Commons licensing brought nuanced decision-making into communicating ethical issues in an open and modelled teaching practice.

Data management: Safety, Security, Privacy, Permissions 

Explicit communication about data management issues such as safety, security, privacy, and permissions are an instructional necessity, as evidenced in many comments made by participants. Polaris’ response was representative of the media and digital skills and fluencies revealed in the participants’ lived experience as a teacher educator when shifting student learning from closed and password protected learning management systems into open, web-based, educational spaces such as blogs visible to the public:  

I've made it part of my mission to become very literate in those areas. So that while I can't provide legal advice, I do make blog posts very, you know, related to students protecting your privacy, protecting student privacy … I tend to avoid things that require students sign up … I'm always engaging in open practices while respecting the need for privacy of my students of my learners … I knew I really need to learn much more to make sure that I was protecting their privacy, helping them learn to protect their own privacy (Polaris).

Another consideration was found in the reflective artifact created by Rigel which showed an icon of a “data dementor” in a demon shaped image, with this character appearing to eat the word ‘extractive’. These words and images were located in close proximity to the words ‘media tools have dangers’, data, privacy, algorithm, proprietary, and lock. From this artifact, I inferred that Rigel’s experiences in OEPr showed an awareness of the darker side of data management and surveillance technology, thus modelling care and concern for their own and students’ data management skills and competencies. 

          For Andromeda, the experience with communicating issues surrounding safety, security, privacy and permissions were transitional in terms of awareness of these issues for their own OEPr but also in building awareness of safety, security, privacy, and permissions with their students. This included explicitly teaching students about password protection of pages and posts on a blog site, thus ensuring students had agency and control of permissions to sensitive or confidential information published to the web.

I noticed that students’ privacy and security were not included. So that kind of, I don't know, surprised me or almost hurt me a bit, I was like, Oh, I better make them more inclusive, or more included, or more obvious…. with that security piece, I did stop and think about different ways that I could do something at a lower level that was safer. But now I know how to better do that (Andromeda).

Aquila suggested the use of student pseudonyms to cloak students’ identities if that was a privacy enhancing choice offered to students. Izar suggested intentionality in course designs when making safety, security, privacy, and permissions decisions: 

… for our course sites, we do have things that are only available to the learners for good reason, like a Zoom link, you know. There are things you have to keep safe and that may not be appropriate for public consumption.

Merak reflected on the risk-benefit equation and the tensions that emerged when considering safety, security, privacy and permissions within the MDL of an OEPr: 

I guess my desire to have students live, sharing in the open in my course and finding there was a bit of tension for me in terms of protecting them, or just making sure that they were feeling safe enough that they were thinking through these things without it just being stressful was another tension for me.

From these experiences, I suggested that although institutional policy may guide their data management strategies, it was concern for student safety and security that ultimately shaped the communications about safety, security, privacy and permissions for many of the participants in this research.

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