Facet 3.3: Criticality
When considering MDL in an OEPr experience, there is intentional decision-making by participants relate to open publication of scholarly works and interactions with students. These decisions include limiting submissions or providing reviewer support to open access journals (BC, SH) to share on specific social media platforms (AT, FJ), to engage with students in open discourse spaces e.g. Discord or Twitter rather than within a closed learning management system (ER, LV, RB), or strategically using a course hashtag to send out notices and communications (CS, LV, RB). In PL’s digital artifact there is an explicit mention of the critical role of media literacy - “proficient users can become more critical and can become media makers. I think media literacies has to include action beyond consumption/viewing”, which highlights shifting roles from consumer to producer of digital productions. For AT, there is awareness of “the skills, dispositions and practices, which enable you to critically read AND create multimodal digital texts. ER emphasises that MDL includes
a huge interim information literacy fake news piece here because we have to decipher media, we have to make meaning from, you know, the media that we consume, but at the same time, we're not just consumers. We have to be able to critically consume and critically create new media.
Identity work also means finding your place within the faculty in which you work. For SH, this means “trying to offer something new, trying to kind of leverage my experiences in my networks to kind of build capacity”. For others, their lived experiences involve facing fears and accepting the risks of openly sharing professional identities, as exemplified in RB’s comment: “it's not just about I'm scared to share. It's I'm scared to share because of professional repercussions, which is very different.” This resonates in the experiences of participants with bilingual practices, and those working within Indigenous and international contexts. For RB, this includes a process of reflective practice, looking back at iterations and variations in identity work, stating “it took me this whole reflective activity to remember where this all started, and how my identity formed, it was like I'd forgotten it, but it was there all along”.
Participants shared MDL related experiences with identity work when teaching their teacher candidates to share their professional identities in open web-based spaces. Consideration for “this practice of helping teachers to sort of grow into their digital public persona through, you know, open writing” was mentioned by ER, LV, OW, RB, SH, and UF. An understanding that digital identity is fluid and iterative is mentioned by AT: “they're like Cummins’ identity texts, except it is their digital identity texts - this is who I am, this is what I care about … but you can shift that, of course, into whatever space you want” (Cummins & Early, 2010). Identity work also involves conversations and negotiations with teacher candidates, as exemplified in RB’s comment “many of my students are international, and they're really frightened of their identities and what they could say online. So like, they share that back with me and we negotiate what things will look like”.
MDL within identity work with students involves explicit instruction, as indicated by UF:
These tensions and challenges were echoed in other participants’ experiences when working to develop teacher candidates’ digital identities as exemplified by SH’s comment:I often do the visitors versus residents grid with my students, just so that they can acknowledge where all of their identities are making footprints and who owns that as a way of talking about the challenges of technology, which I think like that's this big elephant in the room that we don't often get to really talk about.
For the participants in this study, digital identity is one of the critical components of MDL in their OEPr, as they circulate and distribute media and messages within their open, web-based communication ecosystems.there's a lot of emergence happening … with young adults growing into their professional identities. But there are, I think, really profound intersections that I think we've got a lot more to learn there, you know. We're asking for openness, but I think we also recognize that openness for this generation of young professionals comes with some baggage.
Sustainability is a concern from OW’s lived experiences with an ongoing media and digital project: “I'm hopeful that the project will live beyond me, and that maybe that's part of the open practices thing is ushering others into practices so that they can be sustainable and enduring, too”. Sustainability issues emerged from SH’s experiences, but this led to a rethink and recalibration of digital networks and collaborations since it is:
For circulation of student coursework, AT identifies one challenge since “a lot of my students are very hesitant to share openly, even within our, the classroom space, their assignments, their productions. It makes them feel vulnerable”. BC’s experiences, as echoed in those of LL, OW, and RB, mentions encouraging students to publicly sharing their work:really sort of in those conversations grounded, situated, you know, like bricolage if you will, that we start to kind of uncover the nuances of the questions that come up in our practice, and then when we're with others, we can get through. So, I continue to believe in that model. … I started to develop networks with people who are working in digital literacies across Canada, finding different solutions.
AT asks students to “critically review global education programs and share their reviews online as digital flyers, for an audience of educators … Students share with classmates and are also encouraged to share on social media”. When circulating student work to wider audiences, one challenge is the sustainability of this practice, as AT indicates:either through mechanisms I provide in the course, or mechanisms I teach students about and encourage them to use. You know, so for example, if we're playing around with Scratch, and you know, the purpose is to give student teachers firsthand experiences with programming that they can then take into their practice. I encourage them to grab examples of existing code, published their codes, compare codes, share codes, you know, share their work at different kinds of events.
ER provides one suggestion for involving students in making critical decisions about circulating their media productions online:I would say that most of their things could be found, but they're not in public spaces. But it is something to think about, I think whether they should be more visible. It's always hard to organize those things, you know, to think about what is the best way, and where to put it? Where should it live?
I just share examples of what's happened to me, what’s happened to others. And you know, the reality of sharing online and some of the repercussions that can occur. And then from that point, they have informed enough consent, I think, to take this on, or not take it on, and most still do. But I think because they're already doing this elsewhere, as well. They like to hear the cautions, but at the same time, they're going to continue doing what they're doing.
In summary, the generated themes from the focus on facets of MDL in the lived experiences of the participants results in a closer reflection on communication, creativity, and criticality. Communication includes an exploration of audience, ethical practice, and data management with a focus on safety, security, privacy and permissions. Creativity is evident in experiences with multimodal media productions and performances as a teacher educator. Criticality is a factor in the emirec nature of media engagements, in identity work for themselves and their students, and in nuanced decisions when circulating media productions.