Mapping Educators’ Social Learning Ecologies to Deprivatize Practice
Apr 12 @ 12 pm
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For years, the professional lives of many K-12 classroom educators have been stretched across a variety of contexts, leading to a combination of both privatized and deprivatized teaching practices. Despite varied and ongoing school reform efforts in the United States that have intentionally incorporated collaborative structures, many aspects of teachers’ pedagogy, peer networks, technology use, and professional development remain private. To better understand public and private dimensions associated with K-12 educator practice – and to ascertain the promise of more open teaching practices and educator learning opportunities – this study suggested that a social learning ecology (SLE) is a useful framework affording expansive and open learning pathways for educators. The focus of this study was to better understand educators’ networks of support by mapping the distributed ecologies of social relations, resources, and settings relevant to their professional agency. The underlying premise of this dissertation was that by naming, intentionally accessing, and navigating their SLEs, educators in K-12 settings would recognize their SLE as an important component of professional learning that contributes to deprivatizing their teaching practice.
Through a case study methodology, three research questions were investigated: 1) How do educators define their SLEs? 2) How does an educator’s SLE contribute to deprivatizing their teaching practice? 3) How does an educator’s awareness of their SLE influence how the SLE is leveraged? The cases studied illuminated how educators leverage different members of their SLE for different purposes, that specific attention to the presence of one’s SLE can result in more purposeful leverage of the SLE for professional growth, and that there are some specific conditions that underlie educators’ decisions to leverage their SLE.