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

P-IP - glossary item

Post-intentional phenomenology (P-IP) is a qualitative research framework and methodology grounded in ontologies from Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Foucault. This approach to phenomenological research focuses on the reciprocal nature of subject and object. Researchers are immersed in the research rather than bracketing or bridling their perceptions of the research. Researched by Ihde, Vagle, Verbeek, and Hosess, the nature of 'through-ness' (Vagle, 2018) is explored. Research characteristics include entanglements, dogged questioning, hyphenated tension, flux and fluidity described as lines of flight, reflexivity, and bearing witness. (This definition emerges from the graphic of Post-Intentional Phenomenology created for this research; see Figure 1).

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Glossary 19 alphabetic listing of glossary items with links to notes that describe each item plain 2023-06-28T15:29:30+00:00
Here is an alphabetic listing of the glossary items included in this dissertation document. Each item is linked to a note where the item is defined, described, and/or examples provided. These glossary items are also embedded throughout the document as notes within pages, where they provide 'just in time' clarification for you, the reader.
- Actor Network Theory
- Affinity Spaces
- Alternative Dissertation
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Black Box technology
- Block Chain
- ChatGPT
- Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS)
- Creative Commons
- Cynefin framework
- Data Gathering
- Digital Rights Management (DRM)
- Educommunication
- Emirec
- Episteme / Phronesis
- Faculty of Education (FoE)
- #FemEdTech
- Free and Open Software (FOSS)
- Homo Faber
- Hupomnemata
- Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA)
- Learning Management Systems (LMS)
- Makerspace
- Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)
- Media and Information Literacy (MIL)
- Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
- Open Educational Practices (OEPr)
- Paywall
- Platforms
- PDF
- Portable Graphics Network (PNG)
- Post-Intentional Phenomenology (P-IP)
- Practice - both noun and verb
- Research Ethics Board (REB)
- Safety, Security, Privacy, Permission (SSPP)
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada (SSHRC)
- Teacher Candidates (TCs)
- Teacher Educators (TEds)
- Teacher Educator Technology Competencies (TETCs)
- TPACK
- Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans
- UNESCO
- Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
- Universal Serial Bus (USB)
- Visitors / Residents
Phenomenology Phenomenology was both philosophy and methodology for this research (Creely et al., 2020). As the primary locus and topic of this study, phenomenological research aimed to reveal and describe lived experiences in order to gain understanding of the meaning of phenomena (Cilesiz, 2011). Thus my research focused on “richly describing the experiential essence of human experiences” (Tracy, 2020, p. 65) as this related to MDL and OEPr in teacher education.

I created a remixed graphic rendering of the conceptual framework of phenomenology in order to gain understanding (see Figure 1 below).

  Two central concepts in phenomenology were the notions of lifeworlds and intentionality. Lifeworlds are described as the immediate experiences of what already exists, emerging from the world in its natural and emerging state (Tracy, 2020). The lifeworld is where the phenomena were experienced and lived (Vagle, 2018). In this research, this lifeworld included both the physical world of the participants' geographic localized ecologies but also their digital and electronic spaces described through I-Technology-World relationships (Idhe, 1990; Rosenberger & Verbeek, 2015). Intentionality was described as the meaning and “connections that emerge in relations, contexts, and across time” (Valentine et al., 2018, p. 463). This use of the word intentionality was not to be confused with the intent, purpose, aim, or plan to do something. For phenomenologists, intentionality described “the way humans are connected meaningfully with the world” (Vagle, 2018, p. 126). Phenomenological researchers were aware of how “words, language, concepts, and theories distort, mediate, and shape raw experience” (Tracy, 2020, p. 65). Criticality and self-reflection were imperative considerations in phenomenological research (Tracy, 2020).

In order to fully understand the post-intentional phenomenological (P-IP) paradigm (Clifden & Vagle, 2020; Vagle & Hofsess, 2016) within which this research was framed, I first explored the differences between the transcendental phenomenology and the hermeneutic, existential phenomenological research paradigms, since these two paradigms were more often applied to phenomenological research. I then uncovered the third phenomenological paradigm and explained why post-intentional phenomenology (Vagle, 2018; Valentine et al., 2018) provided the best fit for this research.
Transcendental Phenomenology
Transcendental, or descriptive phenomenology, was inspired by Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness (Tracy, 2020; Valentine, 2018). How the research participant knows, or is consciously aware of some object, real or imagined, thus holding a ‘consciousness of something’, was foundational when describing the “essence of a phenomenon or experience” (Valentine et al., 2018, p. 464). The researcher must set aside their biases or habits of seeing while conducting the research and data analysis. This was done through a process of bracketing or transcending previously conceived theory, experiences, and understandings. This removed the researcher’s influence from the interpretation of the phenomenon (Valentine et al., 2018; Tracy, 2020). Since meaning was derived from the “intentional relation between subject and object” the research studied the “of-ness” of the phenomenon (Vagle, 2018, p. 39). The focus was on accurate and rich descriptions of the phenomenon as it was understood or known by the research participants.

  For this research, the phenomenon under scrutiny was the MDL within OEPr. This research shifted away from transcendental phenomenology since I did not ‘bracket’ or suspend my “habits of seeing” (Tracy, 2020, p. 65). It was not just the knowing or understanding of the phenomenon of MDL within an OEPr, as seen through a teacher educator’s experiences that interested me. It was the phenomenon of how participants' MDL shaped micro-practices in becoming open educational practitioners that is the aim of this research.

Interpretive Phenomenology

Interpretive or hermeneutic phenomenology focused on embodiment and being in the lifeworlds and intentions relating to a phenomenon and was grounded in the philosophies of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer (Valentine et al., 2018). This shift in phenomenology from knowing to being resulted from Heidegger’s ontological interest in how people gave subjective meaning to phenomena. Interpretive phenomenology was not just concerned with consciousness, but in how lifeworlds constituted intelligible structures (Vagle, 2018) and how these meanings were revealed through language and discourse, thus emphasizing the intentionalities within people’s stories as a form of sense-making (Tracy, 2020). Vagle (2018) applied the preposition ‘in’ to describe the ‘in-ness’ of intentionality whereby the human subject is ‘in’ “intersubjective, contextual relationships” (p. 42). Bracketing was replaced by reflective and reflexive practices that ‘bridle’ or restrain the researcher’s positionality and perspectives on the phenomenon (Valentine et al., 2018). In this way, the researcher was not removed from the research, but openly acknowledged their assumptions and positionality while they shared their reflexive understandings of the phenomenon (Valentine et al., 2018).

  Although a fuller presentation of interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) as outlined by Smith (2004) was beyond the purposes of this research, it was important to reveal three characteristic features of IPA – idiography, inductivity, and interrogation – that influence post-intentional phenomenological research. IPA followed an idiographic research sequence, meaning that the researcher collected one case or participant’s story at a time, bringing it to a degree of closure, before moving on to subsequent cases or conducting a cross-case analysis of themes for convergence or divergence (Smith, 2004). Since I conducted interviews and storying events simultaneously and interwoven in time and space, this excluded IPA as a research method.

  Researchers following an IPA strategy inductively analyzed data and are open to unanticipated and emergent themes or topics as well as continuing to interrogate extant literature (Smith, 2004). While these characteristics may be evident in the research, since my process included a fluidity to the coding and analysis that deductively generated themes and categories. I explored patterns within the whole-part-whole descriptions of the phenomena in conjunction with the interview process and the reading of literature.

Although transcendental and interpretive forms of phenomenological theory were of interest, it was post-intentional phenomenology (P-IP) that provided the best fit for this research since I posit that the MDL of teacher educators fluent in OEPr will be gathered in a fluid, liminal, boundary crossing, and dynamic praxis that continually shifted toward an ideal of becoming open, becoming literate, and becoming teacher-educator. The next section explores P-IP as it related to this research.
Researcher Positionality This research is grounded in my experiences in education, as well as my extensive background as an elementary school educator. I bring my own lived experiences as an open educator, teacher educator, teacher of critical media and digital literacies, and novice researcher to this dissertation work. This research is informed through my engagement in global networks such as the Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN), UNESCO Open Education for a Better World, and the Open/Education Technology, Society and Scholarship Association. This research is enhanced by cross-border collaborations within Virtually Connecting and the International Society for Technology in Education Inclusive Learning Network, as well as my explorations in open educational spaces such as Ontario Extend, Ontario Open Education Fellows, Creative Commons, and Mozilla Open Leaders. These places and spaces inform and shape this dissertation research.

My positionality as a new researcher is supported by my academic persona as a scholarly writer and media-making educator. This post-intentional phenomenological (P-IP) research (Vagle, 2018; Valentine et al., 2018) applies crystallization methodologies (Ellingson, 2009, 2015) to explore teacher educators’ stories of becoming, as revealed in their hupomnemata (Foucault, 1988; Weisgerber & Butler, 2016) and through their interview conversations. In this research, I explicate how these lived experience stories and artifacts, as shared by participating Canadian TEds, are gathered and become offerings of research data, since “everything that shows, offers” (Rocha, 2015, p. 6, emphasis in original).
Post-Intentional Phenomenology Post-intentional phenomenology (P-IP) shifted the focus for my research from being to becoming, from “identifying invariant structures … toward exploring the various ways that phenomena are socially produced in context” (Valentine et al., 2018, p.466). Vagle (2018) applied the preposition ‘through’ to describe how the lifeworlds and intentionality found in phenomena were permeable, malleable, non-linear and shifted over time. Intentionalities and lifeworld experiences were reciprocally circulated and produced by the human participants as well as the social systems, habits and practices found ‘through’ the phenomena (Vagle, 2018). Theoretically, P-IP “takes place along the hyphen, the jagged edges of phenomenology and post-structuralist ideas, where stories are in flux, where we enter into middles instead of beginnings or ends” (Vagle, 2015, p. 597). This notion of being hyphenated suited my research questions since I perceived that the phenomenon of media and digital literacies within an OEPr would have no beginning or ending.

This framed my understanding that knowledge of the phenomena, and the phenomenon itself, was fluid, always becoming, since knowing about lived experiences with MDL would be “changed to the extent that reality also moves and changes” (Horton & Freire, 1990, p. 101). P-IP researchers suggested that phenomena are not rigid, but were temporal and partial, since the focus of the research is on examining the essential features of the phenomenon “at a given point in time, for a given group of participants, contexts, or cultures” (Valentine et al., 2020, p. 466). Thus, post-intentional phenomenologists take into account the “multi-dimensionality, multi-stability, and the multiple ‘voices’ of things” (Ihde, 2003, p. 25) as well as the variant ways participants’ lifeworlds emerged. It was through the notion of intentionality, or the “directional shape of experiences” (Ihde, 2012, p. 24), that I further determined P-IP was an appropriate theoretical framework for this research. P-IP was theoretically linked to connectivism (Siemens, 2018) in that intentionality was a “commitment to the idea of connection – and that the meaningfulness of living and the lifeworld resides in the connectivity among humans, things, ideas, concepts, conflicts, etc., not in humans or in things or in ideas alone” (Vagle, 2018, p. 128). This suited my research design.

Conceptually, a P-IP paradigm shifted away from the notion that there is a “brute reality out there – present and fixed – with an essence that can be both immediately perceived … and brought to light and expressed in language” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 651). I considered how the phenomenon of media and digital literacy would be represented by transcendental illusions, contaminated by past, present, and future (St. Pierre, 2013; Vagle, 2018). For this research into MDL in the OEPr, I attended to St. Pierre’s (2013) notion of the “materiality of linguistic and discursive practice” (p. 652) where language and reality exist together. Theoretically, P-IP pushed me to consider where I needed to reject binary thinking about becoming media and digitally literate in favour of a logic of connection (St. Pierre, 2013; Vagle, 2018).

Clarity of the P-IP construct was gained through the Deleuzian conceptions of assemblage and lines of flight (Adkins, 2015: St. Pierre, 2013; Vagle, 2018) as both are seen as central to P-IP. Assemblages, described as the shapes of things, are concrete collections of materials that tend toward both stability and change (Adkins, 2015). Lines of flight are transitory (Adkins, 2015); exhibiting movements of fleeing, flowing, leaking, and eluding (Vagle, 2018) within the phenomenon being researched. Vagle (2018) describes three lines of flight afforded by P-IP which are helpful for this research: first, a “re-conception of the intentional connection” with a “focus on how things connect rather than on what things are” (Vagle, 2018, p. 129, emphasis in original) which emphasizes instability and partiality; second, re-conceiving of intentionality through a both/and perspective of individuals within their worlds, both agent and acted upon; and third, relationships and connections as being less linear, more transitorily multiple and shifting across “distances, intensities, and movements within and among things, relations, ideas, theories, and experiences” (Vagle, 2018, p. 131). These theoretical understandings suited my research design.

When I juxtaposed P-IP with Ellingson’s (2014) conception of crystallization, I confirmed my thinking about how P-IP supported the notion of becoming a media and digitally literate, open educational practitioner. Rocha (2015) re-emphasized that P-IP research was conceived as an assemblage by describing the shifts in phenomenology as it moved from a focus on objects, on being, and on giveness, but added his own reduction with a focus on offerings. St. Pierre (2013) underscored P-IP as being “entangled, connected, indefinite, impersonal, shifting into different multiplicities” (p. 653).

As a P-IP researcher, seeking to find the stories of MDL within OEPr through lived experiences, I must “examine practices rather than going deep, looking for origins and hidden meanings that exist outside of being” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 649). It would become evident through productions and provocations created with and without technologies, that the temporal, partial, and contextual features of ambiguous, emergent, and variant phenomena (Valentine et al., 2018) such as MDL in an OEPr might be revealed. Thus, my P-IP research would rely on gathering rich data from a variety of sources and from lived-experiences “meant to stand as testimony, bearing witness” (hooks, 1994, p. 11). In this research, proxies for teacher educators’ MDL within their OEPr were revealed in writing, interviews, observations, media productions, discourses, and histories. Rocha (2015) referred to these as “offerings” (p. 6). In this way, the phenomena of becoming a media and digitally literate open educational practitioner in Canadian FoE was understood as a “relation of possible meanings being shaped, produced, and provoked” (Valentine et al., 2018, p. 467) and as a “movement against and beyond boundaries” (hooks, 1994, p. 12).

For P-IP researchers, reflexivity requires a “dogged questioning of one’s own knowledge as opposed to a suspension of this knowledge” (Vagle, 2018, p. 82). This involves continual attention to moments where connection/ disconnection became evident, where normality is assumed, where bottom lines are discovered, and where shock or insights emerge (Valentine, 2018). Research data is iteratively analyzed through wholistic, selective and detailed readings (van Manen, 2014) that shape and crystallize the facets found within whole, parts, meanings, particularities, and unique assemblages. It was in these crystallizing moments that I as a P-IP researcher used reflexivity to open the potentialities of turning to wonder (Rocha, 2015; Vagle, 2018). It was in these open moments when the lived experiences being researched created feelings of awe, perplexity, and surprise. In this way, the research and the writing of phenomenological research benefited from multi-modal expressions of visual, auditory, language, images, art, video, or music (Vagle, 2018; van Manen, 2014). From this review of P-IP I confirmed that this philosophical framework was the best fit for this research.
Research Questions 12 the questions that frame this research plain 2023-10-29T21:50:49+00:00
The primary question for this research is: “What lived experiences of media and digital literacies are evident in the open educational practices of teacher educators in Canadian faculties of education?

These sub-questions help frame the research:
- What are the lived experiences with media and digital literacies of teacher educators? What does it mean to be media literate and digitally literate as a teacher educator?
- How do media and digital literacies inform or shape practices of teacher educators immersed in OEPr? As a teacher educator, what is it like to be an open educator and how might media and digital literacies shape your practice?
- What are the lived MDL experiences of teacher educators in Canada, as evidenced in the ethos and stories of their OEPr?
Research defines OEPr as collaborative pedagogies utilizing digital technologies and authentic learning encounters for “interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation, and empowerment of learners” (Cronin, 2017, p. 18). In other words, teacher educators will individually or collaboratively select OEPr to support their ways of knowing, designing, planning, and assessing teaching and learning events (Cronin, 2017; Nascimbeni, 2018; Paskevicius, 2018; Paskevicius & Irvine, 2019).

Through this research I capture the teacher educators’ storied enactment of MDL within OEPr as shared through their experiences (what people feel); practices (what people do); things (the objects that are part of our lives); relationships (our intimate social environments); social worlds (the groups and wider social configurations through which people relate to each other); localities (the actual physically shared contexts that we inhabit); and events (the coming together of diverse things in public contexts) (Pink et al., 2015). When gathering these stories, I bring my own lived experiences with MDL in my OEPr as a teacher educator to provide both background and a catalyst through which these stories will reflect and refract.

This post-intentional phenomenological (P-IP) research (Rosenberger & Verbeek, 2015; Tracy, 2020; Vagle, 2018; Valentine et al., 2018) is explained in the next sections of this dissertation where I bring critical subjectivity, collaborative action, a pragmatic reality, and an epistemology of experience (Guba & Lincoln, 2005). I apply a crystallizing methodology (Ellingson, 2009) to share my voice, reflexivity and media infused textual representations, described as traditional alpha-numeric texts incorporated within images and graphic designs. In this way, I will be interrogated as I locate my ‘self’ as researcher-participant, both within and outside the research field of study (Guba & Lincoln, 2005).

Chapter summary In summary, this introductory chapter lays out the background and explores my rationale for conducting this research. Then the research questions are stated. My researcher positionality is presented and the reasoning for the alternative design used for this dissertation document is explained. Table 1 provides a synopsis of my research agenda as recommended by Cresswell (2012) and modelled by Paskevicius (2018).
Table 1 – Synopsis of Research Agenda

Topic	A post-intentional phenomenological study into the media and digital literacies in Canadian teacher educators’ open educational practices.
Problem	Identified needs for media and digital literacies are found in global and national level reports. This presents an ever more pressing problem for teachers and teacher educators given the current priority for online and remote educational instruction.
Purpose	My purpose for this research is to add to the corpus of research focusing on teacher educators and aims to expand understanding of open educational practices from teacher educators’ contexts by examining the lived experiences of teacher educators who reveal their teaching practices openly, with a specific focus on their understanding and practice with media and digital literacies.
Research Questions	What lived experiences of media and digital literacies are evident in the open educational practices of teacher educators in Canadian faculties of education? What are the lived experiences with media and digital literacies of teacher educators? How do media and digital literacies inform or shape practices of teacher educators immersed in OEPr? What are the lived MDL experiences of teacher educators in Canada, as evidenced in the ethos and actions within their OEPr?

In the next chapter I provide the theoretical and conceptual frameworks used in this dissertation research. This includes the theories of socio-constructivism, connectivism, philosophy of technology, and pragmatism. I explore phenomenology with a focus on post-intentional phenomenology (P-IP) as a framework for this research. Under the conceptual frameworks section, I examine fields of endeavour relating to teacher education and teacher educators, media and digital literacies, and open education.

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Figure 1: Phenomenology