Teachers as media creators and prosumers: exploring the reasons & values behind their YouTube pedagogical activity

ABSTRACT

Due to the COVID pandemic, school teachers – like many other educators –needed to become vastly more digitally capable almost overnight. The results have ranged from the modest to the extraordinary. Teachers turned to content production at previously unseen levels. While recent years has seen increasing interest in the engagement of teachers with social media as a pedagogical tool and how it can advance their personal and professional capability, little attention has been paid to why and how they invest in creating and distributing pedagogical content via YouTube. This paper explores that question. First, we put forward a theoretical framework to allow better understanding of the issue. This draws from several lines of literature to set out a comprehensive framework to interrogate and contextualize the reasons teachers invest in creating and distributing YouTube content. The second part of our paper presents findings from an ongoing study of 115 teacher-produced YouTube video channels. Initial analysis suggests that the participants place strong value on gifting their knowledge and believe that sharing, contributing and creating new understandings are hallmarks of a more professional digital pedagogy. But the reasons they do so are not heterogeneous. Rather they are complex and in some ways surprising.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociability and teacher identity
• teachers as prosumers
• professionalism in the digital era

Acknowledgements

The research informing this paper has been supported through funding awarded by the Kazan Federal University Strategic Academic Leadership Programme. We thank the two anonymous IES reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions towards improving this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An example of this would be the short video on teacher imposter syndrome ‘Adam’ crafted and posted on 20 July 2021 in response to a comment by ‘Melissa’ on an earlier video he had made; https://youtu.be/iVnjMH_EzCI

2 See Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner (2020) for a detailed discussion of this framework and the related value types.

3 See https://educators-go-digital.jrc.ec.europa.eu/about.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Kazan Federal University Strategic Academic Leadership Programme.