07.04.2022
This is a short abstract of our conference presentation at ECER 2022 together with Gemma Tur and Liat Biberman-Shalev.
Higher education plays a key role for the development of professional identities (Trede, Macklin, & Bridges, 2012). This also applies to the development of teacher identities in the present and digital world. The relevance of digital forms of communication and cooperation for teaching and learning has recently been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The necessity of preparing teachers for education in a digital world leads to the question of how fruitful experiences with digital media can be brought about in teacher education programmes. Aiming at those experiences, this international study focuses on asynchronous digital communication with weblogs and explores the relation between agency learning and experiencing online communities of inquiry in teacher education programmes. The study draws on a quantitative methodology in three teacher education programmes in Germany, Israel and Spain including teacher education for primary and secondary education as well as general and vocational education.
Weblogs offer interesting kinds of digital expressions and participation for education in a digital world. In relation with restrictions to prevent the dispersion of COVID-19, synchronous digital communication using video conferencing systems are widely used by teachers to interact with learners. But besides synchronous communication, research in blended learning highlights the importance of asynchronous digital communication for learners’ reflection and sustainable communities (Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes, & Garrison, 2013). Encouraging open dialogues and participation with weblogs among pre-service teachers offer potentials and opportunities for reflection and critical engagement in an online community (Eutsler & Curcio, 2019; Wassell & Crouch, 2008).
Social presence in computer-mediated communication has emerged as an influential concept to approach experiences of online communities. This has recently been underlined by studies of online communication during the COVID-19 pandemic (Nguyen et al., 2020). The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework draws on social presence and combines the experience of the salience of other persons in online environments with the experience of a teaching presence as well as a cognitive learning presence. This combination shapes dimensions of online learning communities in blended learning environments (Vaughan et al., 2013).
The concept of agency learning refers to the development of a personal capacity to act autonomously as well as to exploration of the social constitution, relational nature and institutional embeddedness of professional agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2007; Edwards & Carmen, 2004; Engeström, 2005). For teachers, agency consists of interaction in complex situations like collective discussions aiming at the participation of learners (Edwards & Carmen, 2004; Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011). Digital environments like PLE (Personal Learning Environment) have been analyzed as pedagogic experiences allowing students developing abilities to enact agency (Castañeda & Tur, 2020).
To explore those aspects of agency learning and online learning communities with weblogs, the study investigates three courses with different learning designs in higher teacher education. The fundamental learning activity in all investigated learning designs is to write weblog entries. The designs vary in the social structure of writing and posting those blogs (individual or in group) but require to write 3 to 6 weblog entries during the course. All learning designs combine the weblog activity with peer comment activities. While all involved higher education institutions offer a learning management system (LMS) with a weblog feature, the study varies the use of a separate weblog platform to address different kinds of open communications.
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