Discussions

Your Name and Title: Ioana Literat, PhD student

School, Library, or Organization Name: Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California

Co-Presenter Name(s): Erin Reilly, Research Director, Annenberg Innovation Lab

Country from Which You Will Present: United States

Language in Which You Will Present: English

Target Audience: researchers, teachers, administrators, training consultants

Short Session Description: This presentation will discuss the results of our collaborative and interdisciplinary research on participatory models of professional development in education, explaining the core values and design principles behind successful PD programs for teachers. 

Full Session Description:

The first wave of work on new media and the classroom was technology-focused, as schools sought to ensure that every American child had access to networked computing in the face of a persistent digital divide. We have been largely successful in this task, with recent research suggesting that as many as 95 percent of American school-aged children now have digital access. But the downfall of this success was that teacher professional development became increasingly centered on defining digital literacy by offering workshops on specific applications to use in the classroom.  A technology-based solution will simply result in an arms-race where each school spends more and more of its budget on tools, while stripping bare the human resources (teachers, librarians) who might help students learn how to use those tools in ethical, safe, and creative ways.

Beyond tackling the digital divide, we need to devote resources to resolving the participation gap, which refers to access to core skills, knowledge, and learning experiences required to more fully engage with this emerging landscape.  In practice, many of the core skills needed to join a networked society can be taught using low-tech, non-networked technologies or no-tech means, even if schools have grossly uneven access to core technologies. However, teachers need to feel comfortable implementing these innovative pedagogies, and for this, they must have access to the most valuable and relevant professional development opportunities.

The idea of establishing a working group on participatory models of professional development for teachers grew out of discussions that occurred during the Digital Media and Learning Conference 2011. The aim of this working group was to bring together those who are designing, developing and implementing initiatives to support teachers in understanding the affordances of digital media in learning, and to engage in a much-needed dialogue on culturally relevant professional development. We believe that, in order to generate effective models of participatory professional development, an engaged collaboration is needed between multiple stakeholders who bring a diverse set of ideas and challenges to the conversation. Our group is, thus, a mixture of researchers, teachers and school administrators from a variety of disciplines, schools, and states. Instead of working in silos on the same issue, coming together as a collaborative has led to a productive and important discussion of how to scale and sustain successful models of 21st century professional development in education.

This panel will bring together core members of this working group, to discuss their experiences in designing and implementing participatory models of professional development in diverse educational settings. The panelists will address the values identified by this working group as key elements of participatory PD: participation, not indoctrination; exploration, not prescription; contextualization, not abstraction; iteration, not repetition. These values – and the design principles that they inspire – offer a blueprint for an innovative type of professional development. By incorporating these values into the design of professional development programs, researchers and practitioners can efficiently craft initiatives that are participatory, non-hierarchical, personally and professionally meaningful, relevant, flexible and sustainable.

Importantly, the framework we suggest stresses the significance of collaboration across disciplines, regions and cultural environments. A participatory environment reflects the community it serves; we must build a community of participants who support, encourage, and engage with one another. Looking to the definition of participatory culture given by Jenkins et al. (2006), we can see characteristics of a community that supports participatory learning.  Building a professional development community suggests that everyone contributing to the learning experience -- teachers, administrators, students, policy makers and parents -- needs to work together to foster participatory learning.  

Many examples of professional learning communities show that establishing a digital network is an important piece of the experience. But, the online network is only one part of a blended online / offline experience that should also offer a hyperlocal experience to professional development. Hyperlocal reflects the importance of geography and time. This gives teachers opportunities to meet fellow colleagues within their own school or geographical location for an on-the-ground support-system with peer mentoring and hands-on instruction. It also extends asynchronous sharing common in digital networks to real-time participation where physical cues from participants can shape unpredictable directions for deeper discussions and reflections.  

Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session: http://dmlcentral.net/resources/5135