Facet 2.3: Connection
Relationships
From the participants’ lived experiences through/with technology, particularly resulting from the pandemic, many focus on challenges of how to build and maintain relationships. Vega suggested that “the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated an openness to building community online.” Dorado reflected that relationship building required active listening, not just delivering messages, and that this happened along a continuum from short term contacts to longer term, deeper connections precipitating through trust.For Aquila this linked back to experiences and relationships developed over time, where geographic locations mattered less and maintaining relationships mattered more: “I guess, you know, the idea that we're better together, that our voices matter from any place that we can find, we can build closer relationships with people that we don't necessarily know, that's the strength of weak ties”. For Vega, this relationship work required “unconditional hospitality” described as recognition “that when you're a guest in someone else's space, then there's certain roles and responsibilities. But also, when you're hosting a guest, there's roles or responsibilities. So that relationship between guests and hosts, it goes back and forth”.I think that whether it's between teachers and students, or researchers and participants in online spaces with distant others that you may never ever see in person, I think that kind of relational work has to happen, especially if you're doing critical literacy work, because you've got to have a lot of trust (Dorado).
Lived experiences for Perseus focused on relationships with students and that “often, we forget that that relationship is imbued with power” and that relationship building work is human work:
This intentionality in Perseus’ lived experiences of OEPr highlight the need for humanizing the learning experiences for their students from a caring stance, one that encompasses compassion, empathy, fairness, honesty, openness, and respect for human dignity. From this comment, I gained insight into Perseus’ perspective of relationships with students that addresses power differentials between the perceived or real hierarchical positions between students and educators.I think that truly profound and humanizing connection is absolute. It's always been essential, but it is even more essential now, in my view. One of the things that I think for teachers to bear in mind, and it's an important consideration from Nel Noddings’ work for me anyway, is that oftentimes we enter into a relationship with our students as teachers, with the intention of providing care with the intention, of course of respecting those ethical standards of practice (Perseus).
Collaboration
Experiences with collaboration ranged from research focused projects to classroom teaching activities. In the OEPr responses from Leonis, Lyra, Orion, Perseus, Polaris, Rigel, Sabik, and Vega, options to collaborate and communicate were prominent in their shared experiences. Research collaborations for OEPr appeared to emerge organically. For Leonis, it started with collaborations in their PhD dissertation work, leading to a SSHRC grant where the collaborators “were actually on my research team. And they were the video people that would come in. And we'd always start out with them talking about their experience making video on YouTube and sharing positive and negative obviously”. Leonis suggested that “the digital tools allow us to collaborate online, for example, it doesn't have to be online, but let's just that's where I've been lately”. For Merak,Polaris shared experiences of collaboration that involve mentoring: “the early career mentoring I received from a colleague who became a trusted mentor, co-teacher and friend, opened an opportunity to collaborate with experienced teachers”.thinking about collaboration shows how embodied a lot of experiences are for students and so how they are building community and are able to develop, for example, digital literacies, and different competencies online collaboratively and physically with other students in the classroom and engaging with one another (Merak).
Building on the learning of others
Within the lived experiences with OEPr, several participants mentioned that they made an effort to build connections with experts in their field of study and bring outside experts into their classroom teaching. Aquila suggested: “it's really about connecting with expertise in different ways and showing students that they can connect not just to databases and resources online, but can connect to the people behind them”. Aquila and Lyra mentioned they reached out to authors of papers they had critiqued as a way to build on the ideas presented by these other scholars: “I think we need that connection with experts, you know, or, yeah, things that we know work and in different ideas, not the same ideas … as we already had” (Dorado). In recognition of the knowledge and time shared by experts, Lyra expressed a “deep respect for these individuals and also a deep awareness of their generosity and willingness to connect. So, you know, often in classes, I'll tell the students well, if you're interested in (named author’s names), reach out to them”. For their own research and knowledge sharing, Izar made efforts to “try to make outputs open, try to make as much of the teaching as possible, open, because it can have effects that are interesting, if you make a connection with another educator”.In summary, the facets of OEPr generated from the data gathered for this research showed specific faces and edges to the conception of what it meant to be a teacher educator who modelled an OEPr. Themes surrounding access, choice, and connections were evident in these narrative fragments. Issues of access revolved around the edges of entry, intentionality, and language. Sharing, design considerations, and agency were features when participants contemplate choice-making in their OEPr. Facets revealed in connecting as part of an OEPr for teacher educators included how to build and maintain relationships, engage in collaborations with others including students, and connect to expertise in order to build on the learning of others. In the next section, the media and digital practices found within an OEPr are explored.