Beginning
For this research, I apply a post-intentional phenomenological methodology to explore teacher educators’ stories of their lived experiences within their participatory, collaborative, networked, shared, and public-facing educational practices (Cronin & MacLaren, 2018; Lohnes Watulak, 2018; Lohnes Watulak et al., 2018; Tur et al., 2020). Current research in the field of open educational practices (OEPr) has limited exploration in the field of teacher education and has yet to explicitly examine the critical role played by media and digital literacies (Bozkurt et al., 2019; Cronin, 2017). This prompted my wonderings about how teacher educators’ OEPr are impacted by the application or absence of media and digital literacies?
This dissertation is presented in six chapters. In chapter one I share the rationale and research questions driving this investigation, followed by my positionality as an educator and scholar in the field of teacher education. I then share details and the rationale for the alternative dissertation (ALT-DISS) production format for this manuscript. Chapter two includes the literature review outlining the theoretical and conceptual frameworks grounding the research of media and digital literacies in teacher education from an open educational lens. In chapter three I share the research design for this inquiry including the methodology and methods. This includes the data gathering methods, research phases and timelines, participant involvement, interview design, coding and analysis processes, and the ethics review considerations. In chapter four I share the data analysis and results obtained from the research. Chapter five includes the discussion of the findings. In chapter six, I conclude this dissertation with chapter summaries, implications, limitations, recommendations and conclusions from this research.