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Abstract
As new technologies promise to be an enduring feature of the landscape of teachers’ work, we consider how teachers implicitly bring stories forward into their classroom explorations with new media as a part of their ‘informal learning’. By ‘stories’ is meant specific classroom texts as well as preferred teacher practices with those texts. The article represents a reflection on the methodological role that ‘elicitation’ can play in drawing out teacher thinking during a time of professional change, thinking that would otherwise likely remain embedded, particularly when teachers’ attention is focused forward on innovation in practice. The methodological use of ‘elicitation’ emerged in the first year of an ongoing teacher action research study, in which seven teachers have been involved in a professional development initiative that actively engages teachers in examining changing literacy formations, beginning with the teachers’ own literacy formations. The methodological practice of elicitation borrows from phenomenology, ethnomethodology, narrative research, reader response theories, curriculum theory and psychoanalysis, and emerged as a way to acknowledge the life histories that teachers were bringing to their professional development with new media. We suggest that elicitation can potentially draw out deep and sustaining sources of a teacher’s commitment, as well as resistance, to change. It can help disclose the tensions between commitment and resistance that even teachers who voluntarily undertake to incorporate new technologies into their practice may experience. Within a teacher action research framework, elicitation can also serve to remind teachers (and others) of the value of what they know and are learning, thus contributing to teachers developing a ‘scholarship of practice’ in response to any actual or perceived ‘intensification’ of their work.
Notes
1. A SMART Board is an interactive whiteboard that works with a computer and a projector. The computer’s desktop image is projected onto the interactive whiteboard. Because the screen acts as both a monitor and an input device, the computer can be controlled by touching the screen (Wikipedia, Citation2007).
2. This research is graciously supported through a Social Sciences and Research Council standard research grant (410–2006–0161; 2006–2009) entitled ‘Changing Literacies, Changing Formations’.
3. Ethical approval has been granted to use ‘Learning with Laptops’ or ‘LWL’ in published work on the project.
4. A camcorder, two digital still cameras, four webcams, a hard drive and dedicated server, four wireless routers, and laptop transport cases and student backpacks have also since been purchased. Two of the present schools have laptops (two each) purchased through school budgets, while two schools also have SMART Boards bought using school funds by principals supporting the teachers’ endeavours. One school procured funding to install a large wireless room equipped with videoconferencing capabilities, and that is available for use by teachers and their classes as well as community members after school hours.
5. This quote represents a small excerpt from Genevieve’s paragraph‐length literacy autobiography, which is cited in full in Strong‐Wilson (Citation2008b).
6. This paragraph (translated into English by the lead author) originally comes from the Cahier de l’Élève (p. 38), the student workbook that accompanies Ma trousse d’écriture (Groupe Beauchemin, Citation2005), which is a writing program consistent with the ‘Six Traits of Writing’. The ‘Six Traits’ is a teacher‐generated model first developed at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL) in Portland, Oregon (www.nwrel.org). The program breaks writing down into six essential traits: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency and conventions (www.thetraits.org). The model has since been expanded to ‘6 + 1’, with the additional trait being ‘presentation’. Professional development training by, or based on, the program is available and widespread. Genevieve attended a professional development workshop on writing early in 2007, in which she was introduced to the Ma Trousse d’Écriture program and the concept of the ‘Six Traits of Writing’.
7. Tikki Tikki Tembo’s full name in the story is Tikki tikki tembo‐no sa rembo‐chari bari ruchi‐pip peri pembo (Mosel, Citation1968). The story has been disputed for its cultural authenticity on the matter of Chinese parents giving their children long names.