Exploring the edges of collegiality: a cross-case analysis toward humanizing teachers’ connected learning

ABSTRACT

This article provides a comparative case study of two connected learning experiences in teacher education that vary in scope, participants, time, and design to consider the questions: 1) What characterizes humanizing engagement across varied experiences of connected learning in teacher education? and 2) What repertoires of practice become shared through discourses of collegiality in educators’ connected learning experiences? Back-tracing from educators’ written reflections to their digitally networked activity in Twitter chats, processual case analysis involved rounds of inductive coding and exploratory data visualization. We identified repertoires of practice across three continua of preservice and inservice educators’ practices–sharing, care, and experimentation–which together characterize a range of more and less humanizing discourses of collegiality. Participants in both cases reflected on experiences across the spectrum of each continua, highlighting the limits of these connected learning designs in fostering humanizing learning experience in teacher education. We provide implications for teacher educators regarding fostering more critical and reflexive humanizing connected learning in teacher education as well as for the design of such experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• connected learning
• humanizing pedagogies
• critical digital literacies
• Twitter
• teacher education
• teacher professional development

Acknowledgments

We wish to acknowledge the National Writing Project, a professional network of K-University educators in local communities at 175 colleges and universities, as a site of teacher-led experimentation and commitment to a humanizing praxis. Likewise, we have been inspired by the curiosity and willingness to experiment exhibited by the teachers in Cherise McBride’s course. We thank these educators and the educators in CLMOOC for endeavoring alongside us to enact more equitable and just educational experiences. We appreciate the critical and constructive feedback of the reviewers of this manuscript, and especially the critical care of the guest co-editors throughout the review process. We also acknowledge the unseen labor of our loved ones and families who over the past two years made space for this project in particularly trying times. We also wish to acknowledge the collaborative nature of this research. All authors participated in all aspects of the research and manuscript preparation with each taking lead in an area: Anna Smith oversaw the research design, methods, and review process; Cherise McBride constructed the theoretical foundations; and Christopher Rogers led the collaborative theorizing rounds.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Smith

Anna Smith, Ph.D., assistant professor at Illinois State University, is co-author of Developing Writers: Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age (Open University Press), and co-editor of Handbook of Writing, Literacies, and Education in Digital Cultures (Routledge). Her recent research on writing development, transliteracies, and humanizing teaching and learning is found in Learning, Culture & Social Interaction, Theory Into Practice, and Journal of Literacy Research. She serves as an elected board member of NCRLL and AERA’s Writing & Literacies SIG.

Cherise McBride

Cherise McBride earned a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy and Culture from the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. Her dissertation explores how preservice teachers came to understand, reveal, and apply sociocultural knowledge about students and new media technologies in their designs of digitally-mediated learning. She has shared original research on digital literacies, teacher learning, participatory networks, digital equity, and affective publics at the American Educational Research Association, National Council of Teachers of English, and Connected Learning Summit.

Christopher Rogers

Christopher Rogers was born and raised in Chester, PA and is now a Ph.D. Candidate within the Reading/Writing/Literacy program at University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. His current research interests are in literacies, belonging, and place. He currently sits on the board of the Philadelphia Student Union in addition to serving as Program Director for the Paul Robeson House & Museum.