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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Running word count: 51, 211

Full publication here: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JPCC-11-2020-0090/full/html

Also here: https://www.academia.edu/s/510a397c2a?source=link  

https://doi.org/10.1108/JPCC-11-2020-0090 

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