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. FJ suggests that “the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated an openness to building community online.” DL reflects that relationship building requires active listening, not just delivering messages, and that this happens along a continuum from short term contacts to longer term, deeper connections precipitating through trust.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 (DL).
For ER, this links back to experiences and relationships developed over time, where geographic locations matter less and maintaining relationships matter 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 FJ, this relationship work requires “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”.
Lived experiences for SH focus on relationships with students and that “often, we forget that that relationship is imbued with power” and that relationship building work is human work:
I think that um 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.
Collaboration
Experiences with collaboration range from research focused projects to classroom teaching activities. In the OEPr responses from AT, BC, FJ, LV, RG, SH, UF, and OW options to collaborate and communicate are prominent in their shared experiences. Research collaborations for OEPr appear to emerge organically. For AT, 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”. AT suggests 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 NK, thinking about collaborationshows 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.
OW shares 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”.
Building on the learning of others
Within the lived experiences with OEPr, several participants mention that they make an effort to build connections with experts in their field of study and bring outside experts into their classroom teaching, as ER suggests “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”. Two participants mention they reach out to authors of papers they have 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” (DL). In recognition of the knowledge and time shared by experts, BC 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, CS makes 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 shows specific faces and edges to the conception of what it means to be a teacher educator who models and open educational practice. Themes surrounding access, choice, and connections are evident in these narrative fragments. Issues of access revolve around the edges of entry, intentionality, and language. Sharing, design considerations, and agency are features when participants contemplate choice-making in their OEPr. Facets revealed in connecting as an OEPr focused teacher educator includes how to build and maintain relationships, engaging in collaborations with others including students, and connecting 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.