Microblogging about teaching: Nurturing participatory cultures through collaborative online reflection with pre-service teachers

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Highlights

  • We encouraged collaborative reflection among 77 middle/secondary pre-service teachers using the social networking site Edmodo.

  • Pre-service teachers and instructors found the Facebook-like interface highly usable.

  • Pre-service teachers’ posts that went beyond description of events in field experiences invited and received more and better responses.

  • Pre-service teachers valued peer-to-peer interactions and the choice available in choosing these interactions.

  • Pre-service teachers cited classmates as contributing to growth in craft and reconsideration of pedagogical decisions.

Abstract

Reflection is a cornerstone of most teacher education programs, but common practices have long been individualistic and this has become increasingly evident in an era when young people are participating in online cultures more than ever. Informal participation in digital affinity spaces could provide insights for more formal learning environments. We encouraged collaborative reflection among 77 middle/secondary pre-service teachers using the closed social networking site Edmodo. While there were obstacles and ambiguities, findings indicated that our pre-service teachers found the site highly usable, appreciated the choice and influence afforded them through the medium, and grew as teacher-candidates from peer-to-peer interactions.

Section snippets

Theoretical perspective

The 2009 report by Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, and Robison contended that the proliferation of content creation and digital sharing by young people (Lenhart & Madden, 2005) has resulted in the emergence of participatory cultures. These cultures arise because technologies allow those with similar interests (e.g., gaming, popular culture, lifestyle choices) to communicate, collaborate, share, and learn from each other in ways that would have previously been difficult, if not impossible.

Review of literature

While reflective practice maintains a central role in most pre-service teacher programs (McCabe, Walsh, Wideman, & Winter, 2009), it is not easily defined (Sparks-Langer, 1992) or nurtured. Reflection is a complex process that balances meta-cognitive contemplation with an eye toward refining future actions. We agreed with Dewey’s (1933) description of reflection as “turning a subject over in the mind and giving it serious and consecutive consideration, thereby enabling us to act in a deliberate

Methods

Our study relied on both qualitative and quantitative methods, but it was undergirded by an interpretivist perspective that recognizes the diverse nature of learning environments and the tentative nature of educational research. As we considered reflective practice both within this study and our classes, we sought to maintain congruency among our epistemological assumptions, aims, and context. While our study population was a decent size, we did not seek to produce generalizable results because

Findings

In order to address our three primary research questions, we organized findings according to three main categories: implementation, nature and types of online interactions, and student and instructor perceptions. While these categories overlapped with each other, they also helped us maintain a narrative format that is in harmony with the flow of our classes and our research ventures over the semester (e.g., the usability data from the end-of-study survey is presented alongside corresponding

Analysis and implications

While there is of course a difference between the digital space on Edmodo that we provided and those which people seek out informally, we undertook this study with the hope that some of the affordances of online affinity spaces and participatory cultures might translate to collaborative reflection among our pre-service teachers. In general, we found that many of these chief characteristics did translate to our medium and situation, thus fostering a promising learning environment for our

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