Rationale
- the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) continues to examine policies and practices for media and information literacies (Singh et al., 2016), digital citizenship (Law et al., 2018), and open educational resources (UNESCO, 2019a, 2022);
- the United Nations Leading Sustainable Development Goals - Education 2030 (n.d.) report establishes teacher education as one of the priorities in the achievement of sustainable development goals;
- the push for open educational resources (UNESCO, 2019a) and open access are extends through the open consultation process by an international commission from UNESCO on the Futures of Education which highlights the need to "mobilize the many rich ways of being and knowing in order to leverage humanity’s collective intelligence" (UNESCO, 2019b, para: The Aim).
- the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) researches and documents the need for teachers to be “high-level knowledge workers who constantly advance their own professional knowledge as well as that of their profession” (Schleicher, 2012) noting that the demands on teachers are continuing to increase (Schleicher, 2018).
- a position paper from the European Literacy Policy Network indicates that “many teachers lack competence, confidence and knowledge of effective strategies to harness the potential of diverse technologies to enhance digital literacy teaching and learning, and to foster young people’s resilience to the risks associated with digital technology” (Lemos & Nascimbeni, 2016, p. 3);
- the U.S. Department of Educational Technology released the document Advancing Educational Technology in Teacher Preparation: Policy Brief (Stokes-Beverley & Simoy, 2016); and,
- in Canada, the Pan-Canadian Education Research Agenda Symposium report (Hébert, 2002) identifies the crisis and complexity of teacher education in Canada, and the Canadian government report Democracy Under Threat (Zimmer, 2018) outlines the need to address education of digital literacies. The Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (2020) provides a systems-level framework for global competencies which further drives the transformation of the educational agenda in Canada.
While these identified needs have a sense of urgency in the light of the impact of the global health crises, these are not new issues. Along with a public outcry for media literacies in the face of fake news (Singh et al., 2016) and increasing demands for technologically and digitally literate populations, there is a push to change teacher education generally and the teaching practices of those who teach in teacher educator programs more specifically (Beck, 2016; Ellis & McNicholl, 2015; Foulger et al., 2017; Stillman et al., 2019). The paucity of research relating to the MDL work of teacher educators practicing in open educational spaces is a disadvantage when evidence for the effectiveness of educational practices is increasingly demanded (Beck, 2016). Connected to this issue is the revitalization of teacher education programs in order to “prepare teachers who will teach in transformative ways and leverage technology as a problem-solving tool” (Schmidt-Crawford et al., 2018, p. 132).
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 (OEPr) from teacher educator's contexts by examining the lived experiences of teacher educators who reveal their teaching practices openly, with a specific focus on their understanding and practice of media and digital literacies.