Education focused pracademics on twitter: building democratic fora
Education focused
pracademics on twitter: building democratic fora
Steven Kolber
Department of Education and Training,
Brunswick Secondary College,
Melbourne, Australia, and
Keith Heggart
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,
University of Sydney, Ultimo, Australia
Abstract
Purpose – This paper explores the features of
pracademic practice within online spaces where pracademics, academics and
teachers interact.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses
autoethnographic case studies to showcase the boundary- spanning thinking of
two pracademics, one a practicing teacher, the other an early career
researcher, to provide an overview of how pracademics are engaging with
research and the profession online in Australia, in 2021. Findings – The paper describes
five key features that are central to the development of pracademic practice.
They are rigour and depth, discussion beyond immediate cultural context,
accessibility, knowledge creation and collaboration.
Research limitations/implications – This paper is focused on
the teacher and early career researcher perspectives on pracademia, due to the
extant literature focusing on the well-established academic perspective
primarily. It focuses on fora within the Twitter social media platform and the
#edureading group specifically. The authors propose that the use of Twitter
fora, as those outlined, provides a legitimate form of professional
development, and does contribute to the development of pracademics.
Originality/value – This piece itself is an
output of pracademia; through the writing of this paper, the authors show that
pracademia is possible through teacher and researcher collaboration. The focus
on online spaces, pracademic teachers and a coverage of what’s occurring
provide a new agenda for further research and consideration.
Keywords: Pracademia, Academic, social media,
Professional learning, Teacher development, Teacher leadership, Democratic
fora, Twitter
Paper type Research Paper
Introduction
Australian education, whether discussing
early childhood education, school education or higher and further education, is
increasingly under significant strain. Even before the effects of COVID-19 were
felt in higher education, the challenges of increasing precarity, changing
demands from students, limited governmental funding and the need for skills in
educational technology and data literacy were placing demands upon both early
and later career academics in Australia’s universities (Bradley et al., 2008).
The pandemic has only further exacerbated these issues (Hollweck and Doucet,
2020; Netolicky, 2020a, b). In schools, the situation is, if anything, even
more bleak. The teaching profession is becoming subject to an ever-enlarging
raft of regulatory measures, many of which exist beyond the influence of the profession
itself, as well as increasing workloads, demands for increased accountability
from a critical public seeking answers about Australia’s comparatively lagging
international performance (Beck, 2017; Thompson et al., 2021).
Here we classify teachers as those
professionals primarily involved in the delivery of instruction in early
childhood, primary and secondary education. Academics are those within the
academy educating adults whilst being actively involved in research production.
We recognise that leaders, coaches and other roles with little or no teaching
exist, but that these groups are not primarily engaged in instruction, so have
a greater capacity to engage with research. In many respects, the conditions of
work that face teachers, especially around the high rate of face-to-face
teaching, are the primary force keeping teachers from becoming pracademics and
engaging with research literature, whilst for academics, the precarious nature
of their work limits their ability to engage with teachers which is an issue
that potentially could be addressed through social media. We value the
definition of Walker (2010) who states that a pracademic is one who acts as a
scholar within academia, as well as a practitioner. We believe this
classification has significant value in light of current trends within
education, as outlined later in this paper. One area where teachers and
academics – and the concerns outlined earlier – overlap is in the arena of
professional development for teachers. There are calls for teachers’ practice
to be more research-informed and for teachers themselves to be more
data-literate. Education academics, too, are being encouraged to engage more
with the teaching profession, and to undertake research with direct and
practical applications to schools. There are also calls for especially early
career researchers to have impact and visibility on social media as an
additional measure of success. Yet, the conversation between teachers and
academics is often one that is limited in scope and value, either due to the
influence of commercial considerations, initiative fatigue, or workloads for
both teachers and academics.
While the notion of pracademics is not
entirely unproblematic, it does have some facility to provide a starting point
for considering how both of the groups above might more productively engage
with each other, and how both teachers and academics might seek to control the
development of their own careers and professional standing. This paper focuses
on the experience of two self-assigned pracademics, one a teacher, one an early
career researcher and their engagements with social media as means of
developing their pracademic identities. The literature review that follows
outlines influences that inform these experiences: pracademia, work precarity
and work intensification, before shifting to the focus of this paper the
quality of professional development and ways that social media can provide an
alternative avenue to existing forms of PD. We choose to focus on online fora
due to each author’s fruitful engagement and development within these spaces
and as a clear alternative to face-to-face learning which increasingly seems
unlikely into the near future due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The
autoethnographic accounts of these two cases identify five key features (rigour
and depth, discussion beyond immediate cultural context, accessibility,
knowledge creation and collaboration) that contribute to the development of a
pracademic identity and the development of “third spaces” that function as
democratic fora. These third spaces serve to encourage more democratic
approaches to professional engagement, solidarity and participation. While
these case studies are limited in scope, they do suggest intriguing avenues for
further research into the relationship between pracademic identity development,
professional autonomy and social media as a mechanism for learning.
Literature
review
The potential of pracademics in
education The term pracademic has a history of at least 30 years, according to
Walker (2010), and exists beyond the field of education, having currency in
business, engineering, design and healthcare. The term itself is generally used
to indicate somebody who is both an academic and an active practitioner. Walker
(2010) is more granular in his definition, stating that a pracademic needs to
act as a scholar within academia, as well as a practitioner; that is,
pracademics have two key facets: experience in the field in question and
rigorous academic research and analysis training. He goes on to describe
pracademics as boundary spanners who “live in the thinking world of observing,
reflection, questioning, criticism and seeking clarity while also living in the
action world of pragmatic practice, doing, experiencing and coping” (2010, p.
2).
The term itself holds great potential
for those few who may be able to fulfil its definitions. It may never, nor
should it, cover all teachers or all academics; indeed, perhaps its rarity and
liminal nature is one of its strengths. However, in a properly funded and
aspirational education system, the role of pracademic or a similar functioning
title, such as “teacherprenuer” (Berry et al., 2013), “Research Lead” (Bennett,
2015) or “Middle Leader” (Day and Grice, 2019; Lipscombe et al., 2021) would be
available within a lattice or continuum (Posner, 2009, p. 17) of leadership
roles.
In its current form and in the current
climate, the concept of the pracademic represents roles and classifications
that seek to elevate and promote a specific form of boundary- spanning
professional, aware of multiple contexts within education. This type of
boundary spanning work proved especially important during the pandemic and
during lockdown as groups needed to rapidly rethink approaches and a great deal
of pooled resourcing resulted (Hollweck and Doucet, 2020). Within this context
the globally minded work of Doucet, Netolicky and Hollweck serves as useful
exemplars of multiple classifications, including leader, teacher and even
parent (Doucet et al., 2020; Hollweck and Doucet, 2020) contributing to each.
How,
then, might the benefits of pracademics be leveraged for both teachers and
academics? In other words, we are interested in the ways that pracademics might
be able to use social media affordances to navigate past some of the roadblocks
both professions currently face, and more productively work together.
Macfarlane (2021) suggests that what’s needed is a reconsideration of “the
spirit of research” following the movement towards a neoliberal vision of
research output being the goal of universities. He contrasts these against the
liberal education and traditions of the university, suggesting that previously
a focus on ethics and teaching were the goals of academics. This suggests that
academia has perhaps become too focussed on academic output, in a similar way
to teaching which has become similarly focussed on research, data and
“evidence-based education” (EBE) as in the way those elements that are
measurable (test scores, citations, social media shares) become that which is
most important on both sides of the teaching/academic divide.
Precarity: the life of early career
academics
It is a difficult time to be an early
career researcher (ECR) in Australia’s higher education institutions. Perhaps
the most significant challenge faced by new academics is the precarious nature
of their work. Despite years of study, ECRs are often engaged either casually
or on short term contracts. These contracts are brief, sometimes only renewed
semesterly. Already an existing problem, this has no doubt been made worse by
COVID-19 and the anti- intellectualism within Australian culture. Symeonidis
and Stromquist note that, “Higher proportions of teachers with civil servant
status can be steadily observed in primary and secondary education, whereas
contractual status was reported more often in higher education and early
childhood education” (2020, p. 17).
In addition, and perhaps compounded by
the teaching-intensive (as opposed to research focused or even balanced
approaches of the past) nature of casual academic employment, many ECRs
struggle to maintain a research agenda. Yet, the nature of that research agenda
is increasingly becoming one that is more publicly visible. Eacott (2020, p. 1)
suggests that the nature of research expertise is shifting from a lens of
“publish or perish” system to one of “get visible or vanish”. In other words,
academics are encouraged (and often required) to cultivate an online presence
and followership alongside traditional metrics of academic success. Eacott goes
on to state that what is most often popular on social media among “gurus”
(Eacott, 2017) is not a new contribution to the field but rather is older
material – the “newness” is relative to the knowledge of the audience (2020, p.
8). This means that much of the discussion on social media around education can
become self-limiting, aimed at the masses in a form of megaphone or broadcast
social media use, which is then retweeted or shared among many disparate users.
Out of time: teachers
and work intensification
In perhaps an even more tightly
regulated fashion, teachers across the globe are increasingly being held to
account by a range of different stakeholders. Standardised testing has
increased the focus on the performance of education systems in general and
teachers in particular. In addition to the traditional criticisms of teachers
that they are under-employed (as an example, see Sharma, 2018), newer
criticisms have arisen, arguing that teachers are lazy (Remeikis, 2017),
unwilling to change, or incapable of meeting the needs of the student (Hewett,
2019). Governmental initiatives to address these concerns – whether valid or
not – have included increasing demands of pre-service teacher education,
alternative teacher credentialing programs (e.g. Teach for Australia), and
increased accountability and professional development (PD) requirements to
maintain registration – often at the teacher’s own expense.
Linked to this is the growth of
educational data science. This has led to promises of personalisation for all
students, increased opportunities for disadvantaged groups and decreased
workloads for teachers (see e.g. Schroeder, 2019). Less attention is paid to
the effects that the wholesale adoption of such technologies is having upon
pedagogy or concerns about how the data collected about student and teacher
habits may be monetised (Williamson, 2017).
These global trends have significant
impacts upon Australia’s approach to education and many of them have been wholeheartedly
adopted with little visible success (Lingard, 2010). Even by the flawed
measures presented in standardised testing, Australia’s results continue to
decline in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (Gorur,
2011, 2014; Morsy et al., 2018). These problems – and more explicitly – the
efforts to resolve them – have exacerbated one of the great tensions present
within education: the role of teachers as keepers of their own profession.
Professions have traditionally been defined in terms of how standards were
developed, and membership was maintained (Abbott, 1988). While understanding of
the term profession has changed, it is apparent that teachers are ever more at
the behest of a variety of agents, including, but not limited to governments,
policymakers, large corporations and special interest groups (Williamson,
2017). Teacher’s report feeling increasingly powerless to take action to
maintain or improve the status of their profession – something that is evident
in the limited interest in becoming a teacher expressed by many school leavers
(Bousfield and Tinkler, 2019).
Professional development: fads, gurus
and commercialization
Professional development is a key
battleground in these arguments about the status and professionalism of
teachers. It is also one of the areas that teachers and academics have the most
opportunity to engage and collaborate with one other. Yet, by and large,
interactions between teachers and academics about the topic of professional
development and improving teacher practice remain the exception, rather than
the rule. The dominant narrative of professional learning is based around fads
(Dinham, 2017), gurus (Hattie, 2017; Hattie
and
Hamilton, 2018; Eacott, 2017, 2020), and commercialisation (Hogan et al., 2018;
Williamson and Hogan, 2020). These three forces assert strong influences over
teachers by directing the learning of the profession. Educational fads raised
by gurus inevitably become something that teachers feel they need to know, and
to practice within their teaching practice, often directed by school leaders,
themselves under pressure to improve results. Yet due to the increasing
intensification of teachers’ work (Thompson et al., 2021), the intellectual
foment established by the above three forces leads to a virtue signalling
dilettantism. Two of these fads that have been very influential are: the use of
“research” to develop “evidence-informed teaching practice” and thus excluding
teachers from examining that data for themselves, as modelled by the Visible
Learning movement and John Hattie’s focus on meta-meta-analysis (Hattie, 2008,
2017; Hattie and Yates, 2013)’; and the emphasis on teachers gathering,
analysing and actioning data, such as Sharratt’s (2018) Clarity: What matters
most in learning, teaching, and leading. For the majority of teachers, their
engagement with either research or data is at a superficial level. It is
carried out through a sense of expectation, based on the agenda set by gurus
who exert strong influence over the broader education agenda. This in part
explains the lack of research and data literacy within the teaching profession,
but also suggests why shallow engagement with both is common among the work of
middle leaders.
Each of these ideas, research literacy
and data literacy will be examined in more detail below. Many teachers believe
that educational research is complicated and difficult to access, meaning they
are hesitant or unwilling to use it (Hancock, 1997). This is contrasted with
institutional and organisational initiatives that are increasingly laying claim
to being “research-based” or “research-informed” as demonstrated by the establishment
of specific institutes such as the Education Endowment Foundation in the UK or
the Centre for Educational Statistics and Evaluation (CESE), established by the
New South Wales Department of Education. Of course, there are concerns about
what kind of research this privileges, and what that means for the practice of
pedagogy – something about which Williamson (2017) has written extensively.
These institutions serve as a mediating mechanism between teachers and academic
research: in some ways, they are gatekeepers, determining what research is
acceptable, and what it means for teachers’ practice (Gorard, 2020), taking those decisions away
from teachers themselves.
There are also calls for teachers to
become more data literate. This recognises that schools are increasingly “awash
with data” (Hattie, 2005, p. 11), and teachers are expected to engage with that
data, draw conclusions from it and use that to inform their current and
developing practices. However, various school development programs have
identified that this is a particular area of weakness within the teaching
profession and teachers themselves are only engaging with data in very
superficial ways (Fisk, 2020; Selwyn, 2020). Indeed, Rickinson et al. (2021)
found that among 492 teachers surveyed, research ranks lower than five other
forms of evidence, including student data, where 77% of respondents listed
“student data” (p. 5), in comparison to 43% noting “university research” as
sources consulted to inform decisions. They also found that whilst 70% of
respondents reported having used research in the last 12 months, this was true
for 91% of school leaders, but only 61% of teachers and only 51% for other
staff. This illustrates the importance of research, but also the lack of
engagement with it, as well as the rising tide of data as a crucial source of
information for teachers.
The ever encroaching trends of data and
research – and their influence upon teachers and their practice – fit well
within a model of professional development that privileges single sessions, in
large formats – for example, conferences. These, and similar modes (seminars,
training days, staff development days) remain the dominant form of professional
development for teachers in many cases.
This “deification of data” (Hardy and
Lewis, 2017, p. 5) in education is more complex than teachers engaging with
student data willingly. As is the case with the use of research, there are
significant elements of performativity. It must be seen within the context of
the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), as defined by Sahlberg (2016),
where corporate interests have financial interests in the development of new
forms of education and pedagogical models. One part of GERM is “New Public
Management” (NPM) which is typified by privatisation, managerialism,
performance management and accountability (Symeonidis and Stromquist, 2020;
Tolofari, 2005). Each of these elements is reliant on having a requisite amount
of data to allow for performance management and accountability – and thus there
is an emphasis on gathering that data and using it to measure school and
teacher performance.
Data is increasingly becoming the grist
that drives school, system and policy decisions. As Willliamson (2017) notes,
this drive towards “datafication” (Stevenson, 2017) is not just about informing
teacher practice, but also about determining what is best practice: and the
stakeholders making these decisions about best practice often have vested
interests that can impinge upon what teachers have considered their
professional expertise. In addition, there are suggestions that this increasing
use of data, and its relationship with artificial intelligence, might replace
elements of teachers’ work (Selwyn, 2019). When these ideas are taken into
account, it is perhaps not surprising that teachers, for the most part, are
less than enthusiastic to engage with data within their schools.
The ever-encroaching
trends of data and research – and their influence upon teachers and their
practice – fit well within a model of professional development that privileges
single sessions, in large formats – for example, conferences. These, and
similar modes (seminars, training days, staff development days) remain the
dominant form of professional development for teachers in many cases.
This form of professional development
has been challenged, and alternatives based on ongoing engagement and individual
programs have been proposed. Communities of Practice (DuFour, 2007; Hord, 1997;
Lave and Wenger, 2002; Myers, 1996; Mercieca and McDonald, 2021) or Instructional Coaching (Hollweck, 2019; Knight, 2008)
are two such examples. However, the cost-prohibitive and small-group nature of
these interventions does not fit with the neoliberal requirement that
interventions to be “scalable” and able to be made widespread. For all of their
many failings, large conferences and training events meet the requirements of
this scalability despite being almost universally understood as ineffective for
changing teachers’ practices or for improving student outcomes (Guskey and
Yoon, 2009). They are commercially viable, promote the “great man” vision of
leadership (Niesche and Heffernan, 2020, p. 212) and in doing so reify and
sustain the dominant narrative of professional development.
A less costly, yet still scalable
alternative for professional development is teacher-led and teacher-directed
professional development activities. These take many different names, such as
networks, or association meetings, and they have been around, in a physical
form, for a long time. However, the affordances of digital and mobile
technologies, and especially social media tools like Twitter, have increased
the scale and variety of these activities possible, and also lowered the cost
of participating, which has led to a surge of interest (Boyd, 2014).
A key feature of many of these
activities is that they are ongoing and self-sustaining, the absence of which
has been one of the criticisms of much conference-centric professional
development offered to teachers (Wiliam, 2016). Events such as TeachMeets, which
we will discuss later, are individual events with a particular focus
(environmental education, reading, citizenship), but they are also ongoing
discussions that occur across different social media sites, geographic
locations and across days, months or even years. These activities can also
partially escape from the controlling influences of regulatory authorities and
schooling sectors, and also the influences of corporate vendors (although it is
important to note that this is not entirely possible) and be more democratic in
ideal and operation. The crucial challenge of these spaces is the additional
burden of unpaid digital labour shouldered by the participants, but most
pressingly those that moderate, organise and nurture these spaces and their
communities. Whilst they may be free, or low cost, in a monetary sense there is
also a personal and a time commitment cost that needs to be paid in their
sustenance.
They are also, importantly, accessible
to both teachers and academics; indeed, they are becoming a key site of
collaboration between teachers, academics and those across both fields. As yet,
this relationship is relatively under-examined. Regarding collaboration between
teachers and academics, previous writings (Panda,
2014;
Posner, 2009; Walker,
2010)
have focussed on relationships and other forms and locations of interactions.
Most of these locations have been within education or academia. Posner (2009) recommends “the network concept” (p.
23), listing professional associations and informal working groups as examples
of this concept while Walker (2010) added “a research project, or
a consultancy, or a study” (p. 4), as well as “dialogue” (p. 10). While there
is value in all of these, our discussion below describes an addition or third
space in which teachers and academics are present but belongs to neither.
This “third space” serves the purpose of
bringing together teachers and academics around shared goals and common
understandings. Crucially, these exist beyond the boundaries of formal
associations or think tanks: they are, in many cases, spaces created by
pracademics. They allow for the enactment of pracademic interactions and by so
doing, develop both existing pracademics as well as moving practitioners
towards this classification. The examples provided below are illustrative only,
but the features of these will be explored in more detail.
Teachers,
academics and twitter
There
are numerous examples of teachers and academics using the affordances of social
media as a tool for organising and building networks. Twitter and the chats
that occur there (Carpenter et al., 2020; Kolber and Enticott, 2020) are
perhaps the best-known examples of this. While the value of social media as a
tool for knowledge sharing is contested, it is hard to argue against the fact
that many teachers have embraced Twitter for the opportunities it provides to engage
with colleagues, to share their own practice, and to keep up to date with
current research and practice.
Not all online networks are what we
would describe as pracademic spaces, either. Many teachers use social media
tools like Twitter, for example, to share resources and practice. Others share
reflections or commentary about their work (Bergviken Rensfeldt et al., 2018).
While this is a good use of social media, and it is probably of great use to
other teachers, it does not fit with what we would call a pracademic fora –
simply because it does not engage with research, or data, in a meaningful way.
There is no attempt at “boundary-spanning” here – the posters are teachers, and
so is the intended audience. Equally, academics working within Education use
Twitter, too, but the same distinction applies to them. Unless there is a
specific effort to engage both research and practice, we would not consider
those networks to be part of the third space of pracademic-created fora. Below
we describe three examples of these fora.
The use of Twitter is widely discussed
as a space where teachers can find their “tribe” (Kolber and Enticott, 2020),
forming “Professional Learning Communities” (Hargreaves and O’Connor, 2018) or
“Professional Learning Networks” (Goodyear et al., 2019). Increasingly, Twitter
has also become a space where academics seek to share their ideas and exert
influence more widely – either independently, or as mandated by their role. It
is this confluence that makes Twitter a space ripe for interaction between
these two groups and allows spaces within the platform to become digital fora.
Twitter chats are becoming hives of activity, worthy of a growing and vibrant
research agenda (Carpenter et al., 2020). As the increasing expectation is that
professional educators exist within “a network of teachers” (OECD, 2014, p.
168), where teacher time poverty can be overcome by flexibility. Social media,
such as Twitter, serves a purpose of allowing this networking to occur in a
manner and at a time most suitable to the practitioner. An example of this is
#AussieEd, a weekly Twitter chat for Australian teachers, which crucially
occurs at 8:30 p.m. on a Sunday night, aiming to inspire educators as they face
a new week of teaching. As these, Twitter chats have been running since 2014,
it’s safe to assume that not all of them involved pracademic engagement, the
pracademic relevant Twitter chats are those facilitated by teachers, academics,
consultants or education leaders who bring their own discourses, often in collaboration,
and challenge the dominant thinking of the time. It is this contrasting and
challenging of normative processes that continues to keep this platform
relevant and vital, both in bearing and for its place within the education
space.
A second example of teacher-led
professional development are TeachMeets (Esterman, 2011). This is a
well-established speaking event format that originated in Edinburgh in 2006 and
has since spread across Australia with each state and territory forming a
chapter of its own. A typical TeachMeet consists of a number of short
presentations of 2 or 7 min and allows spaces for educators and academics to
share from their own perspectives (Bennett, 2012). Recently these fora have
transitioned online (Kolber, 2020) meaning that they now have no limitations on
participation in regards to geography, but only time zones. A typical TeachMeet
held online will bring together a mixture of academics and practitioners, as
well as those who may be considered pracademics (Kolber, 2020). One recent
example would be the TeachMeet organised by the Australian Curriculum Studies
Association, bringing together Australian, English and American teachers,
researchers and education consultants around the theme of “Empower Them:
Empowering teachers to empower students”. This TeachMeet interestingly was
inspired by an earlier event, entitled “Challenging Teacher Bashing” that then
became a forthcoming book project titled “Empowering Teachers and Democratising
Schooling”. This suggests the kinds of depth and rigour that such events can
achieve, as shown by the further pursuing and morphing of the ideas being
discussed.
Our third example of a professional
learning community is #edureading, which exists across the platforms of
Twitter, Flipgrid, LinkedIn, Facebook and through a private message group
within Twitter. This group draws teachers, academics and consultants together
around common themes and ideas informed by a monthly academic reading. The use
of private groups within social media has been shown to provide peer support
for practitioners, especially among early career teachers (Mercieca and Kelly,
2018), the inclusion of academics within this space further allows
opportunities for pracademic development.
This brief survey of the different ways that
academics and educators make use of the affordances of social media is not
intended to be exhaustive. Rather, it serves to provide a context for the
research outlined below, in which we sought to describe the ways that
pracademics are active in these spaces, and what the results of these
activities might be. Before describing the research, we will briefly describe
the key discussions relating to pracademia and education.
With this in mind, this research sought
to examine the following questions:
1.
What
features of specific digital fora work to support the activities of education
focused pracademics?
2.
Do
the affordances of social media allow pracademics to more readily develop, meet
and exchange ideas than alternatives?
Methodology
The study of the way different groups
interact with and make use of digital resources and social media is a
relatively new field, although there is significant current interest in it.
Within the field of education, broadly defined, there is, as described above,
interest in social media as a mechanism for developing professional learning
spaces, and as a professional development tool. However, there exist
significant ethical issues that can limit the way that groups and individuals
operating within the digital ecosystem might be studied, and this is something
with which the authors of this study grappled. While it was tempting to gather
a wider source of data from, for example, Twitter, by scraping different
hashtags or posts, the authors were concerned that by presenting such data, the
tweets – and those who shared them – might become identifiable – which would be
unethical without informed consent. Equally, if such an approach were to be
pursued, it would be unfeasible to gain consent from every single participant –
the scale would simply be too vast. Another option included the possibility of
using the aggregated metadata of a selection of tweets, but we felt that this
approach, while valuable in some instances, would not present us with the rich,
contextualised and descriptive data we were seeking to answer the research
questions described earlier.
Instead, the decision was made to make
use of autoethnographic case studies. Indeed, the work of Netolicky (2019,
2020a, b), Doucet (Doucet et al., 2018, 2020) and Hollweck (Hollweck, 2020;
Hollweck and Doucet, 2020; Hollwek and Smokorowski, 2020) provides significant
influence over the authors of this piece, with Netolicky’s autoethnogrpahic
reflection on middle leadership being especially influential (2020a, b). While
case study has a somewhat chequered history, especially in education (Yazan,
2015), it is a research approach that aligns well with the work of
practitioners, and also pracademics. Indeed, both Stenhouse (1985) and Rust
(2009) argue that practitioner research is akin to case study, relying as it
does upon “rich, in-depth knowledge (intrinsic or instrumental) of a bounded
unit such as a child, group, class or school” (Hamilton and Corbett-Whittier,
2013, p. 124). Whitehead (1989 as cited in Hamilton and Corbett-Whittier, 2013, p.
11) goes even
further, suggesting that case study is “not simply about the creation
of practical knowledge or theory but instead embodies living educational
theories of the individual as they recount experiences, values and reflections”.
This detailed, personal description of experience – indeed, the level of self-
reflexivity afforded by an auto-ethnographic case study – was particularly
attractive as we sought to define how and why we – as pracademics – operated
within the spaces provided by social media.
One of the contentions amongst
qualitative researchers is how best to define
a case; that is, how should it be bounded
(Yazan, 2015). This is even more challenging in a space like social
media, where the boundaries
are far weaker than in, for example,
a formal professional association setting. Yin (2002, p. 13) suggests
that a case is “a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when
the boundaries between
a phenomenon and
context are not clear and the researcher has little control
over the phenomenon and context”. In some ways, this would fit well with our examination of educationally focused pracademia within
social media. Another definition describes
case study research
as “an intensive, holistic description and analysis of a bounded phenomenon such as a program, an institution, a person, a process, or a social unit”
(Yazan, 2015, p. 13). In this case, the bounded
phenomena are the two authors
of this paper, and below we present
a holistic description and analysis. The inclusion of two examples
is important. One of the key factors
to be taken into account
in a case study is the
idea that it is necessary to draw data from multiple different sources in order
to capture the complexity and entirety of the study.
By including two cases, we seek to do this.
Having determined to use our own engagement with Twitter as the cases
for our research, we then undertook a process of autoethnographic writing,
seeking to describe
our experiences using Twitter as pracademics. Over a period of some months, we crafted and shared our responses to the following
stimulus questions:
1)
What
is your current role? How did you come to this role?
2)
Why
has social media, and in particular, Twitter, drawn your interest?
3)
In
what ways do you use Twitter?
4)
What
are some of the affordances to this use of Twitter?
5)
Who
do you interact with on Twitter?
6)
Do
you consider yourself a pracademic? Why/why not?
The answers to these questions became
the starting point for our analysis. We were inspired by Robert Stake’s ideas
about case study, which meant taking “our impressions, our observations apart”
(1995, p. 71). Stake argues that researchers’ impressions as the main source of
data and making sense of them forms the analysis. Precedence is given to
intuition and impression over protocol (Stake, 1995). The use of two exemplars
meant that our case study had a greater internal validity than a single case
study (Merriam, 1998). Our responses to the questions were examined by both of
us, and then we drew out five key themes that occurred in both our accounts.
These themes are presented in our discussion below.
One of the common criticisms of case
studies is that they have limited value for generalisation. This is something
against which Flyvbjerg (2006) argues particularly strongly. He suggests that,
in some cases, a case study can serve as a critical case that is true for all
others. Of course, Flyvbjerg (2006) is careful to state that, should this be the
case, careful selection of the case is important – but even before that point,
he suggests that formal generalisation can be, at times, overrated. Instead, he
suggests that one can often generalize on the basis of a single case, and the
case study may be central to scientific development via generalization as
supplement or alternative to other methods. But formal generalization is
overvalued as a source of scientific development, whereas ‘the force of
example’ is underestimated. (Flyybjerg, 2006, p. 231)
Certainly, for our case described below,
we are seeking to provide an example that illustrates the value of pracademics
within education, and thus Flyvbjerg’s description rings true. Below we present
the case studies.
Results
The excerpts below present only a small
part of the autoethnographic writing that both Steven Kolber and Keith Heggart
undertook, and they have been edited by both Steven Kolber and Keith Heggart in
order to make them clearer. These excerpts have been selected to be presented
here because they directly relate to the questions related above and provide
data to interrogate for our study of pracademia amongst educators and social
media.
Case study 1: Steven
Kolber (excerpts)
As a teacher, my identity has always
been as a learner first, then a teacher second. By nature, I’m an introvert,
but the desire to share my passion for learning and the things I’ve learnt
drives me outwards to share that. The early stage of my career involved
teaching a narrow range of subjects, year-upon-year, which drew me towards
further study. Between 2012 and 2017, I studied part time constantly, forming a
habit of teaching during the day and researching education in the evenings,
reading academic journals and writing papers. As Department funded scholarships
dried up and the only logical level of study became a PhD, the financial
realities of sacrificing significant time for the possibility of an
increasingly precarious role in academia lacked appeal.
Coinciding with the fading out of
further study, indeed the very refusal of it, was an engagement with Twitter
and a discovery of a group of like-minded educators as an explicit alternative
to structured university-based learning and a move to greater informal
learning.
From a viewer and consumer of intellectual
content shared within this space, to an enthusiastic participant, to finally an
administrator and organiser of multiple groups. I feel that Twitter is a very
small percentage of education, but in many respects it represents many of the
more technically forward thinking and committed people among the broader group
of teachers. Indeed, from the initial conception as a “teacher only” group, the
collective quickly expanded to include educators, adult-learning experts and
academics from across multiple anglophone nations.
Despite this positive perception, I
became increasingly dissatisfied with the tenor of debate and discussion on my
view of this platform despite this fact. Among this group, however, it was and
remains more robust than some elements of my further studies.
As a response to this frustration, I
threw out the idea of a group for academic reading, using Twitter as an
accessible means of communication across boundaries. This acorn of an idea
became the #edureading group, which has persisted from 2018 until the present.
This group brought together my love of education research, an alternative way
of continuing further study and a further granualisation of forming a
like-minded group within Twitter.
The success of this group and an awareness
of a strong Sydney-based TeachMeet movement, bringing together teachers who
were online connections to sharing education presentations and meeting up “In
Real Life” drove me to reinvigorate the TeachMeet Melbourne movement. The
connections I had made through #edureading and previous projects on social
media soon ran parallel to organising TeachMeets and meeting these connections
in the real world. These groups and sharing on education topics later shifted
online during COVID-19 and lockdown, further blurring the lines between the
real and digital world.
The pracademic experiences outlined here
shift between research, teaching and a liminal “third space”, like a parallel
reality. For many online participants, these spaces fill a psychological need,
they serve as a relief from reality and a place where change is possible. These
spaces allow discussion that is uncommon in most educational spaces, places
where aspirational educators improve their craft or dabble in leadership-like
discussions. Similar to the conception of “clicktivism” or “slacktivism”, they
allow participants to practice discussions, clarify beliefs and create new
knowledge and so doing enrich their performance and experiences within their
own school. It also serves as a place where the academic world and the teaching
world exist in the same space, albeit with different purposes and intentions,
discussing big issues that span multiple contexts.
For me, the engagement with research as
a postgraduate was enjoyable but not personalised. The use of Twitter and
building and participating in these fora made research embodied and personal,
the references were no longer empty names on a reference list, but people who,
like me, were constantly developing their ideas through continuous learning.
Initially this engagement was personally beneficial, seeking to “scratch the
intellectual itch”, but over time I’ve come to see that it’s important for our
profession to engage more with research, as a means to speak back to the
dominant neoliberal narrative (Horvath and Bott, 2020) and restate teacher
professionalism.
Case study 2: Keith Heggart (excerpts)
I’m currently an early career researcher
and lecturer at a University in Sydney. I was fortunate enough to gain this
role after completing my PhD. I was a teacher for a long time – both in
Australia and overseas – and worked as a school leader in both countries, too.
I started doing my PhD while still a teacher, based purely on my interest in
civics and citizenship education and ended up working in both professional and
academic roles in higher education by the time I completed it.
Originally,
my interest in Twitter was from the perspective of students. I wanted to see if
it could help broaden the learning experience for the high school students I
was teaching at the time, and I was curious to see if we could make their
learning experiences more authentic – for example, by connecting with authors
in our English classes, or historians in History. However, that project kind of
petered out, as I could not find the purchase or value in the discussions on
Twitter that made it worthwhile the additional effort, and I drifted more
towards seeing Twitter as a network of teachers and, as I undertook more work
on my doctorate, fellow researchers.
Mostly, I saw myself as a bit of a
“lurker”. I was not one of those people who posted about everything – I think
I’m instinctually cautious, and I’d seen, from very early on in my experiences
of Twitter, how what appeared to be simple misunderstandings could cause grave
offence and become blown out of all sense of proportion. I wanted to avoid
that, so I generally limited my communications on Twitter to comments to people
I know well, or to sharing or retweeting interesting causes or articles. The
main value of Twitter, for me at this point, was to connect me with people
whose interests were congruent to mine, and make me aware of research or
publishing opportunities. In this fashion, Twitter has been invaluable. I’ve
developed a broad range of connections and one of the things that’s really
important to me was that they’re from a range of sectors – not all from public
or independent schools, or all from Australian universities. This diversity
really enriches my engagement with the platform.
More recently, I’ve become interested in
Twitter, again, as a tool for learning, but in this case, for teachers and
young people. For teachers, I was curious about how they were using Twitter to
meet their own professional learning needs, and direct their own studies. In
some ways, I was intrigued at the empowering prospect of this – teachers
cutting out the middle person – and going straight to educational researchers
themselves. This was partly inspired by the work that I had done with one of
the educational unions in Australia. In a strange confluence of my professional
and academic lives, I found that was increasingly frustrated by the control
exerted over teachers by various regulatory bodies and systems – effectively
instrumentalising teachers. As a union official, I was frustrated at the lack
of autonomy that teachers could express and as a teacher-educator, I was
curious about how teachers were seeking to regain that autonomy in different
forms and spaces. Alongside this confluence, I was also intrigued in the growth
of Twitter-Celebrities, especially in the educational space, and the way they
leveraged their followership to promote their courses, books or other
commodities.
The answer to many of these questions
seemed to lie in the different ways that teachers were making use of social
media spaces, and particularly Twitter. I was intrigued in the growth of
different “educhats”, such as #aussieed, which I felt had significant potential
to empower the profession. There was a lot that I liked about these spaces,
including the fact that they had low bars to entry – there was no need for
specific locations, the time constraints were small and so on. However, my
experiences in some of these spaces left me feeling frustrated: rather than a
nuanced discussion, many of my interactions felt like “point-scoring” or simply
shouting into the digital void, rather than any meaning-making conversation.
Perhaps the nature of Twitter, or the format of the chats themselves meant that
they were necessarily limited to bite size comments – but I felt this did the
complex nature of education no favours. Equally, the teachmeets that I had
participated in, in the online environment, felt performative – as if the
teachers and other presenting were “doing a bit”, rather than genuinely sharing
practice – something which I felt was present in the physical space teachmeets
I had attended in the past.
However, my feelings of disappointment
changed when I became involved with the #edureading Twitter group. For the
first time, I felt that this was a group that was actually using Twitter
effectively. There were a number of things that really intrigued me about the
group – both the diverse nature of it, and the relatively smaller size of it
when compared to other Twitter chats, and also the ongoing, “slow” nature of the
discussions. I liked the idea that there was work to be done – in the form of
reading an article – before participation was a possibility. And perhaps the
thing that really struck me was that it was a two-way process. Rather than
teachers acting quite possibly as receivers of knowledge, either from academic
sources, or more likely, filtered through various channels and systems, the
teachers in the group appeared to be actively engaged in meaning making and
production of knowledge in the way they applied their understanding of the
academic literature being studied to their own experience and practice. This
led me to think about the way that I see pracademics in this sense working –
and I would suggest that this action by pracademics is what sets apart some
Twitter chats from others.
Discussion
The case studies show different paths
into, and approaches to using social media. However, our Stakean analysis
indicated there are some key features to what we could categorise as effective
use of Twitter by pracademics. Before embarking on a discussion of these
themes, it’s important to note a few key points. This conversation is primarily
focused on the way we, as self-identified pracademics, make use of Twitter. We
recognise that this is one aspect of the ways Twitter might be used by
educators, and we do not dismiss those approaches; our argument is purely that
they are not pracademic spaces. Equally, while we have laid claim to the mantle
of pracademics, we do not present it as a universal curative. There are significant
problems with this conception of pracademia, not least the expectation of
unpaid and unrecognised labour. There also remain questions about formal and
informal learning (Kumar and Gruzd, 2019) and where these fora fit within this
dichotomy and how pracademia intertwines with these ideas, though this question
is beyond the scope of this paper. Pracademic spaces on Twitter are
characterised by the rigour and breadth that
is present in the ensuing discussions. This depth is created by the
selection of topics that are applicable across contexts and actively utilises
“context collapse”, so that participants are urged to link big ideas with their
own contexts explicitly and succinctly (Carpenter
and
Harvey, 2019; Marwick and Boyd, 2011).
This emerged from the case studies in
two main ways: firstly, the example of #edureading clearly identified the
importance of participants in the group engaging with academic literature as a
starting point for their discussion. Such an engagement does not belittle their
own experience as teachers, of course, but it does provide a contextual anchor
from which to engage in the discussions. In this conception, the research
articles provides a lens through which the practices of schooling and teaching
are viewed, rather than overpowering or overriding them. The second aspect was
related to the breadth of the conversation rather than a frenzied free-for-all
over the course of an hour to answer a particular question, the pracademic
spaces we operated within had a slower pace, with conversations, in the case of
#edureading, going back and forth over a particular topic for a month or even
more. This allowed for a more thoughtful, considered conversation – and of
course, is only possible because of the affordances of social media. The rigour
in this case is provided by the academic article under discussion, the multiple
contexts of respondents and the unhurried pace of these conversations.
A second aspect that emerged from our
analysis was the discussion beyond immediate cultural contexts of each
participant. This is achieved in a
number of ways: firstly, teachers in #edureading, are drawn from a wide range
of locations and sectors. This in itself is unusual: teaching is increasingly
becoming sector-bound, and the vagaries of the different systems in different
states make cross-border collaboration challenging. However, teachers from
across Australia and other anglophone nations were able to engage in the
pracademic space, mostly because rather than focusing on topics like school
funding, the focus of these groups was on educational and pedagogical matters
that were relevant to all teachers. This deliberate decision by the group to
focus on those matters that applied to all educators in a unitary fashion,
rather than a divisory one, meant that the oft-run arguments that can derail
productive events never took place. However, even more than that, the
pracademic space was open to both teachers and academics, in a way that few
other spaces were. It is perhaps this aspect that most signified the pracademic
nature of #edureading: after all, the spaces where academics and teachers can
engage together over shared interests and exchange knowledge on an equal basis
are relatively few. This, coupled with the fact that it takes place over a
longer period of time, and makes use of mobile technology and social media,
means that these pracademic spaces are also accessible for a wide diversity of
interested parties.
Perhaps the most important aspect of
these pracademic spaces is that they encourage the practice of professional
enquiry and the formulation of new knowledge. This is a significant shift away
from the rather old-fashioned model of teacher as “appliers of academic
knowledge”, and instead recognises that their professional experience is of
value – and can create new knowledge. Teachers and academics work together as
knowledge creators in pracademic spaces. For this reason and the others
outlined above, it should be clear that pracademic spaces such as #edureading,
and the action of those pracademics within those spaces, foster collaboration
and democratic processes.
As noted earlier, not all use of
Twitter, or other social media, is an act of pracademia, indeed much
communication around education on these platforms are surface level, narrow,
tightly contextualised and lacking rigour and breadth. For this reason, we have
outlined those features, embodied within the #edureading group among others,
that are displayed in spaces that allow pracademic action and generation to
occur. We propose these spaces are worthy of much closer analysis for this
reason alone, as well as for an alternative form of teacher professional
development.
Conclusion
In this paper, we’ve described the
experiences of two self-identified pracademics by focusing on our respective
use of social media to support and explore these personas. Through case studies
and autoethnographic writing, we identified five key features of this use of
social media that we suggest might be used to characterize the educational
pracademic experience. Our ongoing work will be to pursue an expanded study of
self-identified pracademics, using the five features of these fora to locate
similar spaces where they may be found. However, we are mindful of some of the
challenges this research agenda will face, not least in defining and applying
the term pracademic between education and academia.
The conception of pracademic divides and
excludes membership from both sides of the teacher and academic groups, where
significant division and difference already exists. Similarly, these social
media fora are notable for being extremely accessible, but it must be stated
that despite this fact they still draw from a narrow membership. As we have
presented, we see positive potential in the idea of the pracademic as well as
social media as a useful tool to develop them and allow them to practice this
liminal work within a “third spaces”. It must be noted, as explored by Merceica
and McDonald (2021), leaders of these online spaces, despite a tendency towards
distributed, shared leadership, carry much of the burden of the digital and
intellectual labour that sits behind the continuation of these spaces and the
networks of people’s participation that allow them to succeed. From the
perspective of a teacher and researcher, these spaces and the thinking and work
that occurs within them is both stimulating and valuable, but also very clearly
not the core business of either group’s employment. There is also the
consideration of whether these spaces are producing genuine pracademics, or
merely minor online “edu-celebrities” lacking in the rigour of either camp as
suggested by Eacott (2020).
Another concern is related to workload.
Teachers are both expected, at least in a performative way, to engage with
research and data within their work, but this rarely occurs with much rigor or
depth. In a similar fashion, it’s often suggested that academics may not
accommodate collaborative and practitioner-relevant research as much as they
could. As Wallin (2020) notes, “tenor and promotion norms favour individualism”
(p. 166) rather than collaborative discussion within her experience of
university life despite her striving for time to collaborate and discuss
educational matters with colleagues. Within #AussieED, TeachMeets and
#edureading, there is a levelling of the power dynamics between the academics
and the teachers, with the label of pracademics being something that allows
disparate groups to feel equal and welcomed within these spaces. Teachers and
academics are equally empowered to engage with research and speaking back to
the influence that it has over their professional lives. Further, considering
the paucity of such fora is important, meaning that teachers and academics are
often never interacting at all, so if these scant social media spaces are
allowing this to occur, then this is worthy of analysis in and of itself.
Abbot,
A. (1988), The System of Professions: an Essay on the Division of Expert Labour,
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois.
Beck,
J. (2017), “The weight of a heavy hour: understanding teacher experiences of work
intensification”, McGill Journal of Education/Revue
des sciences de l’"education
de McGill, Vol. 52 No. 3, pp. 617-636.
Bennett, E. (2012), “Teachmeets: Guerilla CPD”, Educational
Developments, Vol. 3 No. 4, pp. 23-27. Bennett, T. (2015),
The School Research Lead, Education Development Trust, Highbridge House, Duke Street,
Reading Berkshire, England RG1 4RU, pp. 16-18.
Bergviken
Rensfeldt, A., Hillman, T. and Selwyn, N. (2018), “Teachers ‘liking’ their work?
Exploring the realities of teacher Facebook groups”, British Educational
Research Journal, Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 230-250.
Berry,
B., Byrd, A. and Wieder, A. (2013), Teacherpreneurs: Innovative Teachers Who
Led but Don’t Leave, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey.
Boyd,
D. (2014), It’s Complicated: the Social Lives of Networked Teens, Yale University
Press.
Bousfield,
K. and Tinkler, J. (2019), “Teaching is too often seen as a fall-back option,
and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon”, The Conversation, available at: https://theconversation.com/ teaching-is-too-often-seen-as-a-fall-back-option-and-thats-unlikely-to-change-anytime-soon-
116805 (accessed 30 April 2021).
Bradley,
D., Noonan, P., Nugent, H. and Scales, B. (2008), Review of Australian Higher Education:
Final Report [Bradley Review], DEEWR, Canberra.
Carpenter,
J.P. and Harvey, S. (2019), “‘There’s no referee on social media’: challenges
in educator professional social media use”, Teaching and Teacher Education,
Vol. 86, 102904.
Carpenter,
J., Tani, T., Morrison, S. and Keane, J. (2020), “Exploring the landscape of educator
professional activity on Twitter: an analysis of 16 education-related Twitter hashtags”,
Professional Development in Education, pp. 1-22, doi: 10.1080/19415257.2020.1752287.
Day,
C. and Grice, C. (2019), Investigating the Influence and Impact of Leading from
the Middle: A School-Based Strategy for Middle Leaders in Schools, The University
of Sydney, Sydney.
Dinham,
S. (2017), The Lack of an Evidence Base for Teaching and Learning: Fads, Myths,
Legends, Ideology and Wishful Thinking, Professional Voice, Vol. 11 No. 3, ISSN
1445-4165, Summer 2017, available at: https://www.aeuvic.asn.au/lack-evidence-base-teaching-and-learning-fads-myths-
legends-ideology-and-wishful-thinking (accessed
7 April 2021).
Doucet,
A., Evers, J., Guerra, E., Lopez, N., Soskil, M. and Timmers, K. (2018), Teaching
in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Standing at the Precipice, Routledge,
Milton Park, Abingdon-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.
Doucet, A., Netolicky, D., Timmers, K. and Tuscano, F.J.
(2020), Thinking about Pedagogy in an Unfolding Pandemic: An Independent Report
on Approaches to Distance Learning during COVID19 School Closures, Education International
and UNESCO.
DuFour,
R. (2007), “Professional learning communities: a bandwagon, an idea worth considering,
or our best hope for high levels of learning?”, Middle School Journal, Vol. 39 No.
1, pp. 4-8.
Eacott,
S. (2017), “School leadership and the cult of the guru: the neo-Taylorism of Hattie”,
School Leadership and Management, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 413-426.
Eacott,
S. (2020), “Educational leadership research, Twitter and the
curation of followership”,
Leadership, Education, Personality: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 2 No. 2,
pp. 91-99.
Esterman, M. (2011), “Meet a new kind of professional development:
TeachMeet Sydney”, Teaching History, Vol. 45 No. 3, pp. 50-51.
Fisk,
S. (2020), Using and Analysing Data in Australian Schools: Why, How and what, Hawker
Brownlow Publishing, Cheltenham, Victoria.
Flyvbjerg,
B. (2006), “Five misunderstandings about case-study research”, Qualitative
Inquiry, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 219-245, doi: 10.1177/1077800405284363.
Goodyear,
V.A., Parker, M. and Casey, A. (2019), “Social
media and teacher professional learning communities”,
Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, Vol. 24 No. 5, pp. 421-433.
Gorard,
S. (Ed.) (2020), Getting Evidence into Education: Evaluating the Routes to Policy
and Practice, Routledge.
Gorur,
R. (2011), “ANT on the PISA trail: following the statistical pursuit of
certainty”, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 43 Sup 1, pp. 76-93.
Gorur,
R. (2014), “Towards a sociology of measurement in education policy”, European
Educational Research Journal, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 58-72.
Guskey, T.R. and Yoon, K.S. (2009), “What works in professional
development?”, Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 90 No. 7, pp. 495-500.
Hamilton, L. and Corbett-Whittier, C. (2013), Using Case
Study in Education Research, Sage, Thousand Oaks, California, doi: 10.4135/9781473913851.
Hancock, R. (1997), “Why are class teachers reluctant to
become researchers?”, British Journal of In-Service Education, Vol. 23 No. 1, pp.
85-99.
Hardy, I. and Lewis, S. (2017), “The ‘doublethink’ of data: educational performativity
and the field of schooling practices”, British Journal of Sociology of Education,
Vol. 38 No. 5, pp. 671-685.
Hargreaves,
A. and O’Connor, M.T. (2018), Collaborative Professionalism: when Teaching
Together Means Learning for All, Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, California.
Hattie,
J. (2005), “What is the nature of evidence that makes a difference to
learning?”, 2005-Using Data to Support Learning, Vol. 7.
Hattie,
J. (2008), Visible Learning: A Synthesis of over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to
Achievement, Routledge, Milton Park, Abingdon-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.
Hattie,
J. (2017), “Educators are not uncritical believers of a cult figure”, School Leadership
and Management, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 427-430.
Hattie,
J. and Hamilton, A. (2018), Education Cargo Cults, Osiris Education, Thousand Oaks,
California.
Hattie,
J. and Yates, G.C. (2013), Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn, Routledge,
Milton Park, Abingdon-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.
Hewett,
J. (2019), “Why our education system fails our students”, Financial Review,
available at: https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/why-our-education-system-fails-our-students-
20191204-p53guy.
Hogan,
A., Thompson, G., Sellar, S. and Lingard, B. (2018), “Teachers’ and school leaders’
perceptions of commercialisation in Australian public schools”, The Australian
Educational Researcher, Vol. 45 No. 2, pp. 141-160.
Hollweck,
T. (2019), “I love this stuff!”: a Canadian case study of mentor–coach well-being”,
International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, Vol. 8 No. 4, pp.
325-344, doi: 10. 1108/IJMCE-02-2019-0036.
Hollweck,
T. (2020), “Growing the top: examining a mentor–coach professional learning network”,
Professional Learning Networks: Facilitating Transformation in Diverse Contexts
with Equity- Seeking Communities, Emerald Publishing.
Hollweck,
T. and Doucet, A. (2020), “Pracademics in the pandemic: pedagogies and
professionalism”, Journal of Professional Capital and Community, Vol. 5 Nos 3/4,
pp. 295-305, doi: 10.1108/JPCC- 06-2020-0038.
Hollweck,
T. and Smokorowski, D. (2020), “Pockets of innovation: transformational
professional learning and development”, Flip the System US, Eye on Education, pp.
181-188.
Hord,
S.M. (1997), Professional Learning Communities: Communities of Continuous Inquiry
and Improvement, Southwest Educational Development Lab., Austin, TX.
Horvath,
J. and Bott, D. (2020), 10 Things Schools Get Wrong (And How We Can Get Them Right),
John Catt Education, Melton, Woodbridge.
Knight,
J. (2008), Coaching: Approaches and Perspectives, Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, California.
Kolber, S. (2020), “A new entrant into online professional
learning offerings for teachers”, Professional Educator, Vol. 23 No. 1, p. 55.
Kolber,
S. and Enticott, E. (2020), “Find your teacher tribe online: twitter”, Idiom, Vol.
56 No. 2, p. 40. Kumar, P. and Gruzd, A. (2019), “Social
media for informal learning: a case of #Twitterstorians”, Proceedings of the 52nd
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2019.
Lave,
J. and Wenger, E. (2002), “Legitimate peripheral participation in communities of
practice. Supporting lifelong learning”, Perspectives on Learning, Vol. 1, p. 111.
Lingard,
B. (2010), “Policy borrowing, policy learning: testing times in Australian schooling”,
Critical Studies in Education, Vol. 51 No. 2, pp. 129-147.
Lipscombe,
K., Tindall-Ford, S. and Lamanna, J. (2021), “School middle leadership: a systematic
review”, Educational Management Administration and Leadership, 1741143220983328.
Macfarlane, B. (2021), “The spirit of research”, Oxford Review
of Education, pp. 1-15, doi: 10.1080/ 03054985.2021.1884058 (Online First).
Marwick, A.E. and Boyd, D. (2011), “I tweet honestly, I tweet
passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience”, New Media
and Society, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 114-133.
Mercieca, B. and Kelly, N. (2018), “Early career teacher peer
support through private groups in social media”, Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher
Education, Vol. 46 No. 1, pp. 61-77.
Mercieca, B.M. and McDonald, J. (2021), Sustaining Communities
of Practice with Early Career Teachers, Springer, Singapore.
Merriam, S.B. (1998), Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications
in Education, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.
Morsy, L., Khavenson, T. and Carnoy, M. (2018), “How
international tests fail to inform policy: the unsolved mystery of Australia’s steady
decline in PISA scores”, International Journal of Educational Development, Vol.
60 No. C, pp. 60-79.
Myers, C.B. (1996), “University-school collaborations: a
need to reconceptualize schools as professional learning communities instead of
partnerships”, Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of American Educational Research
Association.
Netolicky, D.M. (2019), “Transformational professional
learning: what, why and how?”, Independent Education, Vol. 50 No. 1, p. 32.
Netolicky, D.M. (2020a), “School leadership during a pandemic:
navigating tensions”, Journal of Professional Capital and Community, Vol. 5 Nos
3/4, pp. 391-395, doi: 10.1108/JPCC-05- 2020-0017.
Netolicky (2020b), “Being, becoming and questioning the school
leader an autoethnographic exploration of a woman in the middle”, in Within,
Niesche, R. and Heffernan, A. (Eds), Theorising Identity and Subjectivity in Educational
Leadership Research, Routledge.
Niesche, R. and Heffernan, A. (Eds), (2020) Theorising Identity
and Subjectivity in Educational Leadership Research, Routledge.
OECD
(2014), “TALIS [teaching and learning international survey] 2013 results.
Paris, 2017 Paris”, OECD, November 2017, available at: http://www.oecd.org/education/school/talis-2013-
results.html.
Panda,
A. (2014), “Bringing academic and corporate
worlds closer: we need
pracademics”,
Management
and Labour Studies, Vol. 39 No. 2, pp. 140-159.Posner, P.L. (2009), “The
pracademic: an agenda for re-engaging practitioners and academics”, Public Budgeting
and Finance, Vol. 29 No. 1, pp. 12-26.
Remeikis, A. (2017), “Malcolm Turnbull slaps down Liberal
MP Andrew Laming over lazy teachers JIB”, Sydney Morning Herald, available at: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/malcolm-
turnbull-slaps-down-liberal-mp-andrew-laming-over-lazy-teachers-jibe-20170117-gtsvst.html.
Rickinson, M., Gleeson, J., Walsh, L., Cutler, B., Cirkony,
C. and Salisbury, M. (2021), “Research and evidence use in Australian schools: survey,
analysis and key findings. Q Report 01/2021”, Q Project, Monash University, doi:
10.26180/14445663.
Rust,
F.O.C. (2009), “Teacher research and the problem of practice”, Teachers College
Record, No. 8, pp. 1882-1893.
Sahlberg, P. (2016), “The global educational reform
movement and its impact on schooling”, The Handbook of Global Education Policy,
pp. 128-144.
Schroeder, R. (2019), “The promise of personalised
learning, Enabled by AI”, Inside Higher Education, available at: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/how-
artificial-intelligence-can-help-achieve-promise.
Selwyn, N. (2019), Should Robots Replace Teachers?: AI and
the Future of Education, John Wiley and Sons, Richmond, Victoria.
Selwyn, N. (2020), “Just playing around with Excel and pivot
tables’-the realities of data-driven schooling”, Research Papers in Education, s.
l., pp. 1-20, doi: 10.1080/02671522.2020.1812107.
Sharma, D. (2018), “Antiquated school day is failing
everyone”, The Age, available at: https://www. theage.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/antiquated-school-day-is-failing-everyone-
20180615-p4zlnu.html.
Sharratt, L. (2018), Clarity: what Matters Most in
Learning, Teaching, and Leading, Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, California.
Stake, R.E. (1995), The Art of Case Study Research, SAGE Publications,
Thousand Oaks, CA.
Stenhouse, L. (1985), “What counts as research”, in Rudduck,
J. and Hopkins, D. (Eds), Research as a Basis for Teaching: Readings from the
Work of Lawrence Stenhouse, Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH.
Stevenson, H. (2017), “The “datafication” of teaching: can teachers
speak back to the numbers?”, Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 92 No. 4, pp. 537-557.
Symeonidis, V. and Stromquist, N.P. (2020), “Teacher status
and the role of teacher unions in the context of new professionalism”, Studia
Paedagogica, Vol. 25 No. 2 [S.l.], pp. 23-45, ISSN 2336- 4521, doi: 10.5817/SP2020-2-2.
Thompson, G., Mockler, N. and Hogan, A. (2021), “Making
work private: autonomy, intensification and accountability”, European Educational
Research Journal, p. 22, doi: 10.1177/1474904121996134.
Tolofari,
S. (2005), “New public management and education”, Policy Futures in Education,
Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 75-89.
Walker,
D. (2010), “Being a pracademic–combining reflective practice with scholarship”,
Keynote address AIPM Conference.
Wallin,
D. (2020), “A day in the life performance of a Re/Dis/Un/Covering
administrator”, in Niesche, R. and Heffernan, A. (Eds), Theorising Identity and
Subjectivity in Educational Leadership Research, Routledge.
Wiliam,
D. (2016), Leadership for Teacher Learning, Learning Sciences International,
West Palm Beach, FL.
Williamson,
B. (2017), Big Data in Education: the Digital Future of Learning, Policy and Practice,
Sage Publishing, Newbury Park, California.
Williamson, B. and Hogan, A. (2020), Commercialisation and Privatisation
in/of Education in the Context of Covid-19, Education International, Brussels.
Yazan,
B. (2015), “Three approaches to case study methods in education: Yin, Merriam and
Stake”, The Qualitative Report, Vol. 20 No. 2, pp. 134-152.
Yin,
R.K. (2002), Case Study Research: Design and Methods, SAGE Publications, Thousand
Oaks, CA.
Also here: https://www.academia.edu/s/510a397c2a?source=link
Comments
Post a Comment