Participatory media for teacher professional development: toward a self-sustainable and democratic community of practice

Abstract

Financial and political pressures on the compulsory education teacher corps in the United States, as well as US higher education, demands a new approach to teacher professional development that shifts the focus away from repeated short-term university-based teacher professional development programmes and toward the nurturing of self-organized and self-sustaining teacher professional development communities of practice. The authors draw on six years of experience providing area studies teacher professional development to multiple cohorts of in-service and pre-service teachers in a hybrid environment to demonstrate a replicable approach to assisting teachers in building an evolving network of professionals in a self-sustaining, democratic community that can assist in the development of voice, agency, and capital for the participants.

Keywords:

• teacher professional development
• online learning community
• teachers as knowledge creators
• participatory media
• community of practice

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA) for providing funding in support of the first offering of this course; succeeding offerings have been supported by the University of Wisconsin–Madison Centre for East Asian Studies through their federal Title VI NRC grants, the University of Wisconsin–Madison Division of Instructional Technology through an Engage grant, the Madison Area Technical College through a special FLAP grant from the US Department of Education, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction through a US State Department Critical Language Fellows grant, the Fulbright Group Projects Abroad programme, and funding from the Confucius Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Platteville. However, the authors did not receive funding from these funding agencies to conduct this research. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions of the organizations that funded the workshops.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Cohort 1 online forums, November 4, 2007 6:03 p.m.