Research Questions
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?
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).