Group Admins
Description
Session Description
Lee and Delaney (2018) contend few faculty in higher education have a working knowledge of Open Educational Resources and Practices, or realise their potential for educational transformation. This applies to professors in many teacher education programs across Canada. Due to a continued focus on solitary conceptions of teaching (Whyte, 2016), teacher education “does little to encourage open and collaborative behavior and may actually discourage it” (Albion et al., 2017, p. 800). The nature of reading, writing, and communication have fundamentally transformed due to the Internet, and literacy practices needed to fully function in the world today continuously expand as new technologies are introduced. Teachers, professors, and researchers are struggling to keep pace. Even though digital literacy is mandated in every Canadian province (Hoechsmann & DeWaard, 2015) change in the classroom has tended to be slow (Brown, 2017; Daniels et al., 2013; Lotherington et al., 2016).
My increasingly complex responsibilities as a literacy teacher educator involve preparing teacher candidates to not only teach print-based literacies, but also New Literacies (Dwyer, 2016; Leu et al., 2013). I have had student teachers demonstrate understanding of curriculum, theory, and pedagogies by getting them to create educational resources to share with classmates (e.g., by posting their work on the class Wikispace). More recently, I have expanded their audience by having them share these assignments on Twitter. My purpose is for teacher candidates to experience the benefits and challenges of digital authorship, OER, and OEP, and to learn the broader implications of what it means to teach and learn in the digital classroom (Ricaute, 2016). This case study from the Canadian context contributes to similar research (Albion et al., 2017; Littlejohn & Hood; Panto & Comas-Quinn, 2013; Shira Hagerman & Coleman, 2017), to illustrate how making such shifts in teacher education requires professors and student teachers to negotiate numerous challenges and opportunites.
In this paper, I reflect upon my experience as a teacher educator at a Canadian university introducing OEP into my Grades 4-8 Language Arts courses to tease out tensions and possiblities of promoting OEP in teacher education in the Canadian context. Teacher candidates in two Langauge Arts classes (85 students) are required to create literature anthologies that engage cross-curriculuar expectations as well as global and urban themes from critical perspectives, as a digital teacher resource. This research is part of an upon a three-year, funded study that theorizes teacher candidates making and sharing videos as a critical digital literacy practice (Ávila & Zacher Pandya, 2013). Research data includes: personal observations and reflections; student-produced teacher resources shared on Twitter; an analysis of online audience response; student questionnaires; and student feedback during in-class discussions. I hope to provoke a rich discussion during my session: When OEP are introduced into teacher education courses in literacies, what opens up? What continues to be difficult and/or risky? In light of these findings, how might we sustainably introduce critical, open pedgagogical processes (Morris & Stommel, 2018) in teacher education programs?
Funding provided by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
References
Albion, P. & Jones, D., Campbell, C., & Jones, J. (2017). Open educational practice and preservice teacher education: Understanding past practice and future possibilities. SITE 2017, pp. 1-9.
Ávila, J., & Zacher Pandya, J. (2013). Traveling, textual authority, and transformation: An introduction to critical digital literacies. In J. Ávila & J. Zacher Pandya (Eds.), Critical digital literacies as social praxis: Intersections and challenges (pp. 1–12). New York: Peter Lang.
Brown, E. (2017). Exploring the Design of Technology Enabled Learning Experiences in Teacher Education that Translate into Classroom Practice. Doctoral dissertation, University of Calgary.
Daniels, J., Jacobsen, A., Varnhagen, C., & Friesen, S. (2013). Barriers to systemic, effective, and sustainable technology use in high school classrooms. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 39(4), 1–14.
Dwyer, B. (2016). Teaching and learning in the Global Village: Connect, create, collaborate, and communicate. The Reading Teacher, 70(1), 131-136.
Hoechsmann, M. & DeWaard, H. (2015). Mapping digital literacy policy and practice in the Canadian education landscape. Ottawa, ON: MediaSmarts. Retrieved from http://mediasmarts.ca/teacherresources/digital-literacy-framework/mapping-digital-literacy-policy-practice-canadian-educationlandscape
Lee, K. & Delaney, C. (2018). Introduction to Open Educational Resources for Teacher Educators. In E. Langran & J. Borup (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 202-207). Washington, D.C., United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/182524/
Leu, D., Kinzer, C., Coiro, J., Castek, J., & Henry, L. (2013). New Literacies: A dual-level theory of the changing nature of literacy, instruction, and assessment. In D. Alvermann, N. Unrau, & R. Ruddell (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (6th ed., pp. 1150-1181). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Littlejohn & Hood (2017). How educators build knowledge and expand their practice: The case of open education resources. British Journal of Educational Technology, 48(2), pp. 499-510.
Lotherington, H., Fisher, S., Jenson, J., & Lindo, L. (2016). Professional development from the inside out: Redesigning learning through collaborative action research. In M. Knobel & J. Kalman (Eds.), New Literacies and Teacher Learning: Professional Development and the Digital Turn, pp. 65-87. New York: Peter Lang.
Morris, S., & Stommel, J. (2018). An urgency of teachers: The work of critical digital pedagogy. Hybrid Pedagogy Inc.
Panto, E., & Comas-Quinn, A. (2013). The challenges of open education. Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society, 9(1), pp. 11-22.
Ricaute, P. (2016). Pedagogies for the open knowledge society. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 13(32), pp. 1-10.
Shira Hagerman, M., & Coleman, J. (2017). Implementing a digital hub strategy: Preservice teacher and faculty perspectives. LEARNing Landscapes, 11(1), pp. 137-152.
Whyte, S. (2016). From “solitary thinkers” to “social actors”: OER in multilingual CALL teacher education. Apprentissage des Langues et Systems d’Information et de Communication [En Ligne], 19(1), n.p. Available at https://journals.openedition.org/alsic/2906
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