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

Facet 3.2: Creativity

Creativity was mentioned by every one of the participants. Further to this, creativity was modelled by many in their digital artifact productions. Within their conceptions of MDL, there is evidence of participants’ awareness of the importance of multimodal and intertextual applications within their teaching practice. MDL are enacted within their own and their students’ productions and performances when constructing teaching materials or crafting assignments to showcased learning. For PL, creativity means resisting the use of exemplars in course materials or assignments and providing less choice since “if you choose something that's really flexible, you know, then there's more creativity inside of that narrow choice”. CS sees creativity when building resources, supported by the affordances offered in fair dealing, Creative Commons, and open resources. CS wonders “if you're thinking about open practices, you might be thinking about, you know, how can we enable creativity? How can we let people stand on their own and make choices around what they're learning and how it's represented?” For most participants, when applying MDL to OEPr, creativity is an emergent quality, tempered by informed choice.
 

Multimodal / Intertextual

Creativity for many of the participants includes accessing, using, and creating within multimodal and intertextual digital and media production environments. This means “understanding how to convey messages, through media in different ways, not just print literacy … we have to be much more well-rounded” (ER). (For a full list of tools and resources mentioned in the research interviews, see Appendix F).
          In SH’s artifact, there is explicit mention of using open, collaborative environments for idea sharing of multimodal resources and the acquisition of multimodal composition skills. For NK, the drive to engage with multimodal resources emerged from their work in graduate studies where:

my curiosity and seeing some of the value in, for example, wanting to present kind of multimodal papers and wanting to remix images, or add video, or like at the time Prezi was kind of new at my faculty. I became like the Prezi ambassador, just because I liked the idea of these kinds of zooming in and out and seeing a visual representation of research that you could kind of manipulate and play with as you went.

Both RB and UF mention multimedia and transliteracy as an entry or gateway into learning and synergistically using “what we need to use in order to learn”. PL connects “critical literacy work that's more print based and multimodal with the digital”, specifically when “looking at an ad the way you would a picture book, like looking at the colors and the text and the font, you know, but the video version, or the digital version”. Creativity is elemental in the facets of multimodal productions, as exemplified in the digital artifacts the participants shared, that incorporate text, icon, image, audio, video, and graphic formats.

          ER sees creative works, particularly remix, as a core element in their MDL:

I don't have students create essays, I figured by the time they're in my course, they know how to do essays. So, we always explore media. For example, students reflect and create multimodal summaries of learning in five minutes for the end of each class.

For AT, creative multimodality and intertextual production with image and video is ubiquitous within their practice:

But the whole multimodal, being able to share video images online. I mean, really, everybody's doing that now, right? I mean, isn't that really the ultimate? When you think about Tik Tok and what's going on there or even Instagram when they brought in the video. … I'm doing a project right now … with a teacher about photography. And it's actually in a social studies part of the curriculum. We're looking at how culture and identity are embedded in photographs. So, I'm really interested in the visual part of digital. But my training is more in multimodality. So I'm always skirting between the critical and something else.

Alternatively, SH brings a critical lens to the creative use of multimodal learning in teaching environments, focusing on the challenges of video enabled teaching spaces resulting from COVID pandemic teaching:

The modality that we've been kind of moving around and back and forth from this online sort of thing isn't a good fit for everyone. And I mean, I can certainly attest to that to that in my own home. I mean, my 11-year-old, absolutely cannot function, because the sensory environment is overwhelming for her. And so, I mean, she's not alone. I know that there are a lot of other students for whom that is the case.

Multimodal creative productions is one answer to addressing the MDL needs in an OEPr.
 

Production

Creative production, as part of MDL in an OEPr, is not just for the purpose of sharing beyond a course. SH questions “When students create content that they share openly online (e.g., websites, digital artifacts, SM posts, accounts, channels) are their interests as learners served?” The challenge in creative productions is ensuring authenticity in the process and products – the content, the conversations, the assignments, and the learning activities – and ensuring these meaningfully relate to a course of study. For OW, and echoed by ER and AT, media productions “became a real opportunity into building my ability to create using digital tools, which then became the driving force for further deepening my media and digital literacies, which became more apparent and necessary as sharing became possible.”

          This practice includes bringing explicit instruction into the integration of MDL into course work since you “can't just make an assignment that requires students to use technology and say I'm doing MDL because you're not. You're integrating technology and maybe fairly effectively, but you're not supporting future teachers in building their digital media literacy” (OW). When crafting digital and media productions, ER suggests that production includes the process and use of “remix, … getting them to understand that you don’t need to create things from scratch, that remixes are new creations in and of themselves. And that it's a way of actually honoring the intellectual property of others.” It is through the active process of creating a product, using a variety of media and mediums, in concert with explicit instruction and critical questioning, that MDL serves the needs of not only the participants’ of this study, but the students they serve.
Performance
Performance is both noun and verb in the MDL of the participants’ lived experiences with OEPr. The act of performing can be done beyond boundaries of time, place, space, and audience. In traditional performance, these factors constrain and contain the acts and actions of performers, teachers, and educators. Performing as a media and digitally literate teacher educator means fluidly shifting the practice from a physical stage, places like classroom, lecture hall, or seminar rooms, to digital spaces where media and design elements set the stage, and the media infused digital creations share the event.

          Within the MDL experiences of the participants, when creating performances in open, web-enabled and digital spaces, these final productions are shaped by essential facets such as voice and co-creation. In shining a light through these facets, some of the edges of MDL ideologies and values are reflected. From BC’s experiences:

researching, teaching and academic publishing in the open has also reflected my commitment to the horizon and disrupting the status quo, interrogating practices that are past their best by date, and ensuring that the underrepresented in the academy … were more visible and their voices heard.

The aspiration to center the voices of marginalized and under-represented populations in openly shared media productions, as a foundational tenet of OEPr, is noted in the experiences of AT, ER, LV, NK, RB, RG, and SH. For RG, this highlights the:
social justice side of open education in terms of giving voice to scholars and to educators, to students, who traditionally don't get to have their voices represented. I think with truth and reconciliation in Canada, with our move towards decolonization, I think open education can play a very important role with this.

          CS mentions creating a “community of voices” to create learning activities and events in open spaces in order to “make good use of what you find to develop content and ideas and bring the outside world in as much as possible”. For AT, it is seen as a performative opportunity for “this expression online, with a real authentic audience that, you know, we didn't have before”.
In NK’s experiences, the challenge in course design as the ultimate performative product, is to “sort of break out of the constraints of crisis, to be able to design in ways that are truly humanizing and enable connections”. For BC, these connections relate to their co-creation with students as part of the performance of teaching and within student-centered learning design. This is evident in their practice of “co-creating assessment rubrics, we're co-creating the criteria, the levels of performance, the ways that we describe high quality work”. UF also includes performative tasks in their media productions in course designs with OEPr, since spending

a lot of my career on like, let's get rid of the exam. What are you trying to test with your test? … But when it's for performance, it's like that's an ultimate goal. But so many people's epistemology is based in this idea of what knowledge is, that it's just this banking model. But I don't want to call it banking model anymore. I want to call it necrophiliac pedagogy”.

When considering the performance at the end of a production process, FJ critically examines the “investment in time”, their own and that of their students, before making decisions that impact this production side of their OEPr. This echoes NK’s thoughts about the impact of this performativity since taking

our practice to a higher level, to an open practice, then our teacher educators, our teacher candidates will be able to see that this is a worthy profession, because here are the voices that are speaking so authentically about what they're doing in the field.


From this analysis, it is evident that creative production and performance is part of the ethos of OEPr and exemplified in the MDL experiences of the participants in this research.
 

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