Social Media fora for building teacher researchers

 

Steven Kolber

Keith Heggart

Steven Kolber, a teacher in Melbourne, has been using social media for many years, in a professional and teacherly manner, seeking engagement, community and new approaches to teaching. What he has come to realise, is that whilst many seem to view social media as a place to trade worksheets and classroom displays, for some of the more engaged educators it’s a death match of ideas.

For Keith Heggart, a researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, his engagement with social media is more about tracking trends through a process referred to online as ‘lurking’, which involves actively following an online space but not always engaging with these. This approach is not uncommon for researchers, looking to engage with education movements, where more bite-sized ideas can be accessed.

Whilst each of these approaches are different, they both represent fertile grounds for professional learning and worthy of exploration through this lens. 

A great deal of research exists exploring the possibility that social media can be used for professional learning and development for teachers, using phrases like Professional Learning Networks (PLNs), Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), or indeed Community of Practices (COPs) which are all slightly different forms of this idea. Whilst this link is well established within we have sought to explore the connection between social media, research engagement and professional learning.

In this article, we explore a concept beyond professional learning and related to the identity of the participants. This involves a term that may be new to many: the ‘pracademic’. This is a term that has currency beyond education, and it refers to those who engage with both practice and research - together - in their work. We’re interested in how pracademic identity is formed, and the role of online communities in this development. We examined the spaces present on one social media site, Twitter, as the starting point for this research.

The spaces we discussed in our paper are the following:

-          #AussieED

-          #edureading

-          TeachMeets

For those not familiar, #AussieED is the original Twitter hashtag and group of teachers using Twitter online. Every Sunday, at 8:30pm, teachers from around the world, though primarily Australia, come together to discuss a topic of importance and significance. For the purposes of this research, not all discussions, referred to as ‘Twitter chats’, engage with academic ideas or research directly this potential is frequently realised there. 

The #edureading group functions similarly to#AussieEd, but is much smaller and directly refers to academic research. This group selects one academic article a month for all members to read, before a TwitterChat. Indeed, the article that inspired this blog is itself one of the first research outputs of the group showing that teachers are capable of being both consumers and creators of research. The work around this group is ongoing and we have noted elsewhere in forthcoming research that within this group: teachers are producing new knowledge using inquiry; they are discussing education beyond immediate cultural contexts; and that there are expectations and support within the group for rigorous debate. We feel these features are crucial for pracademic generation.

The third example is TeachMeets, which are both online and face-to-face professional learning events where teachers present 2 or 7 minute sessions, also around a theme, invariably linked to research or professional reading. This event is often referred to as an unconference, approaching professional learning as a more ‘guerrilla style’ to professional learning, by teachers for teachers.

 Our examination of these different groups, based on our participation in all three, but especially #edureading, identified some common ideas that we felt contributed to the idea of a teacher pracademic. These features were: 

•  Rigour and depth requires that members of these groups engage directly with academic research and discuss these ideas in connection to their personal contexts.
•  Discussion beyond immediate cultural context means leveraging the nature of ‘context collapse’ in online spaces and the global possibility of educators coming together. 
•  Accessibility of the tools where these groups are formed makes them easy for anyone to join. 
•  Knowledge creation both individually and as a collective group is of the utmost importance, not simply reading and responding, but building new knowledge through the combined wisdom of these groups.
• Collaboration through the lowering of boundaries and the shedding of titles and hierarchies within these groups allows genuine interactions and collaboration. 

 

We feel that when each of these five features are present, that the spaces are able to effectively develop pracademics, unlocking a range of new potentials for educational improvement. 

Of course, this is an exploratory study, but it does suggest that engagement with education focused social media chats has significant benefits, both for the teachers involved, and also more broadly for the education profession, as it provides a way for teachers to engage with and show support for other professionals.

If you have not experienced these forms of professional learning, we would encourage readers to explore them further. In #edureading we're always keen for more participants. In addition, as we continue to develop this research agenda we would love to hear more about what other types of social media spaces, or democratic fora, teachers and academics are accessing to develop themselves as researchers, and as pracademics .

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