COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION ANDIN TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL LEARNING
Norbert Pachler and Caroline Daly, Institute of Education, University of London
DRAFT. NOT FOR QUOTATION
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, 11-13 September 2003
Abstract
This paper focuses on the potential of computer-mediated communication (cmc) for the generation of teacher knowledge in the field of professional learning. Claims for the impact of cmc on knowledge creation and dissemination are now well-established. What is much less explored is the impact of this on teachers’ learning. Cmc has brought about changes in the ways in which knowledge can be created and disseminated and offers a potential for teachers to learn through collaborative processes, including participation in electronic discourse. Such participation may challenge orthodox understandings of how professional knowledge is constructed and mediated.
We examine the key issues relating to the professional learning of teachers emerging from the mixed-mode Master of Teaching (MTcg) programme (http://www.ioe.ac.uk/courses/mtcg/) now moving into its third year at the Institute of Education, University of London. We explore how electronic discourse can be generative of participants’ development as teachers, and the significance of this for knowledge which emerges from teachers’ engagement with narrative modes of learning. Teacher learning in this medium does not easily fit into available genres which help constitute the professional knowledge base, for example those provided by academic essay writing, research reporting and logico-scientific writing. Discussion which takles place within virtual learning environments lacks the validation of orthodox mechanisms for identifying learning, and electronic genres, here specifically asynchronous email exchange, have not yet found a position within the ‘academy’. Yet, the early experience of the MTcg suggests that there is considerable scope for enhancing and monitoring professional learning through cmc. The paper explores characteristics of stimulating tasks, successful email postings and effective facilitation, and the impact these have on the production of teacher narratives. Teachers’ participation in cmc is examined in terms of its effects on their learning which, in the MTcg, relates to pedagogical understanding and practice. Such participation impacts upon professional identity and informs an evolving professional knowledge base.
Our deliberations are premised by the fact that the professional development dimension of teachers' learning is undertheorised. In addition, for a decade and a half, in-service teacher 'education' in the United Kingdom has been channelled by central, regional and local government towards training and development reacting to serial policy initiatives rather than allowed to focus on teacher needs and learning. Only of late has there been a recognition of a need for a coherent pedagogy of continuing professional development on the one hand and a focus on teacher learning as a pre-requisite for leadership of pupil learning on the other. Within this context, we examine how far those who take part in an online community, both teachers and Higher Education tutors, develop a concept of teacher learning that is participatory, and become committed to an expansive knowledge base for the profession.
Introduction:
As a precept to what follows it seems important to us to state, as Bentley (2003) rightly notes, that “the big challenge is for systems like education to work out how to learn from themselves” and to move from ‘informed prescription’ to ‘informed professionalism’. How are teachers to meet the increasing expectations of the teaching profession itself? How are they to be prepared for adaptability, transferability and transposability of learning skills, both their own and their pupils’? Sachs (2003) argues for a ‘transformative professionalism’ in which teachers work collaboratively, and proposes five principles for rethinking teacher professionalism: learning, participation, collaboration, cooperation and activism, each of which contributes to a knowledge base which is agentive. Professional identity needs to be learning centred if teachers are to be agents of change. Sachs calls for teacher education establishments to provide the intellectual leadership necessary for ‘activist teacher professionalism’ (2003:76). We deem the Master of Teaching (MTcg) at the Institute of Education, University of London, to make a sustained contribution in this regard. For the purposes of this paper, therefore, we see knowledge-based networked continuing teacher professional learning as an important dimension of bringing about systemic change and reform in a drive for better services, not least in view of Hargreaves’ recent attempt (2003) to conceptualise the quality of a school – or other educational institutions – in terms of the concepts of intellectual, social and organisational capital, that is with a focus on understanding the deeper cultural and structural underpinnings of what makes them effective. Teachers and their continued professional learning are a key concern in this respect.
In this paper we develop further some reflections on computer-mediated teacher learning in the context of the MTcg articulated elsewhere. By way of brief contextualisation suffice it to note that the design of the MTcg builds significantly on the conceptual work of Lave and Wenger (1991) who emphasised that learning best takes place in authentic situations and through authentic activities rather than in the abstract. Importantly, the course design assumes that learning takes place both within the context of participation and in an individual mind through personal meta-reflection on socially constructed knowledge. And, we believe that cmc has a crucial role to play in this process but that it needs to go beyond situated activity and be combined with conceptual and theoretical considerations. The course stimulates professional learning and conceptual and theoretical engagement through questioning and challenging participants’ beliefs and ideas within a framework of what Ravenscroft (2003) calls ‘collaborative argumentation’. In other words, the MTcg requires participants to engage in intra-contextual (e.g. cross-school) comparisons and dialogue along co-constructivist, social-interactionist and socio-cultural lines of thinking (e.g. tutoring dialogue, knowledge construction etc.) galvanised by carefully drafted stimulus material supported by selected digitised texts and facilitated by expert tutors (see Pachler, Daly and Pickering, 2003).
One of the issues that have exercised us as a course team from a research perspective is the challenge of how to make tangible and ‘measurable’ the cognitive changes that represent professional teacher learning through text production in online discussion groups. What characterises professional teacher learning? What are its constituent parts? Does it find articulation in online discourse? If so, how? Can it be quantified? Is it explicit in the archives of online discussions or does it need to be inferred? Are there specific linguistic markers that evidence it? Is textual analysis an appropriate and effective approach? Are quantitative or qualitative approaches more fruitful? What tools, taxonomies, typologies, strategies, approaches etc. – if any – should we use to identify and ‘extract’ learning from web-based archives?
Approaches to ‘extracting’, quantifying and tracking learning in online networks
Despite the vast amount of literature, be it scholarly, conceptual or theoretical in nature, attempting to show how cmc supports learning through scaffolding, interaction and knowledge building, not only is the amount of empirical evidence available to date in support of these claims limited but also, and more importantly in our view, there exist only relatively few frameworks for analysing online interactions and for researching computer-mediated learning. One aim of this paper, therefore, is to initiate a debate amongst the teacher education and the research community working in the field of online learning networks about possible ways of identifying and researching indicators of learning through cmc and their relative merits.
An initial but fundamental consideration must be whether there are generic criteria or indicators which can be used to describe and capture teacher professional learning online. There is growing interest in the construction of taxonomies which attempt to identify generaliseable features of online discourse, using linguistic, behavioural or socio-cultural descriptors. What remains less explored, is the relationship between the affordances particular to online written discourse, and the transformational outcomes for participants. In earlier papers (Pachler, Daly and Lambert 2003; Daly, Pachler and Lambert forthcoming2004) we have discussed this issue briefly on the one hand in terms of affordances of online activities for generating learning, e.g. the need for them to be problem-solving, participatory, intellectually engaging etc. in nature. Another key concern relates to ‘task’ design, i.e. the necessity of an analysis of the nature of participant interaction fostered by the activities chosen. Our experience on the MTcg points to certain problems with activities that are too open-ended as well as those that lock participants too firmly into the paradigm of initiation – response – feedback of traditional classrooms. In this context Laurillard, Stratfold, Luckin, Plowman and Taylor (2000), for example, discuss what they call a ‘minimalist sequence of iterations of dialogue, action-feedback, adaptation and reflection’ which they posit “allows the students to be exposed to new ideas, to link these to enhancing their practice, to improve their practice and link this improved practice to further developed understanding, and to assure the quality of their understanding” (5):
Table 1. Laurillard et al’s Minimalist sequence of iterations of dialogue, action-feedback, adaptation
and reflection
On the other hand, whilst the type and amount of learning through social interaction taking place online will depend significantly on factors such as the nature and composition of online discussion groups seen as cultural communities and cultures-of-use (for a more detailed discussion see Pachler, Daly and Pickering 2003), a number of generic criteria and indicators attempting to describe learning are starting to emerge in the literature. They include levels of reflexivity and higher order thinking displayed by participants as well as the nature of their cognitive engagement and conceptual change such as through making reasoned decisions, adapting to change, reasoning critically, collaborating productively, working independently, seeing multiple perspectives, being able to solve problems, engaging in negotiation of meaning etc. (see e.g. Lapadat 2000, McLoughlin and Luca 2000 or Smith 2003). A significant challenge for researchers pertains to defining indicators that capture the complexities of human learning in general and of professional teacher learning in particular in a way that makes them reliable across different contexts and studies.
One general principle applying to research into identifying and quantifying computer-mediated teacher professional learning evidenced in web-based archives is indeed whether or not to adopt a procedure in which the indicators or categories are pre-determined, usually on the basis of the study of relevant background literature in particular fields, and applied to the data, or whether to adopt a heuristic procedure in which data are not fitted to pre-assigned categories. The latter allows for categories to emerge from the data “through an iterative process of analysis and tentative category assignment” (Nunan 1999: 56).
In the remainder of this section we briefly examine some possible approaches (tools, taxonomies, typologies, strategies etc.) discussed in the literature which pre-determine indicators to a greater or lesser extent. Whatever indicators or taxonomies are devised, a core problem is the difficulty of relating them to a theory of professional learning. If learning is to be at the heart of the new professionalism, we need a coherent theory which informs the selection of methods of analysis, and what is meant by the ‘conceptualisation’ which is said to be taking place through online interaction. Further to Lapadat’s critical question of online interaction, “Can conceptual change be identified and tracked?” (2000), we must ask what types of conceptual change are we talking about? This is crucial to understanding how cmc can contribute to a knowledge base for an emergent ‘activist’ profession, yet this question remains not only unanswered but mostly unasked by taxonomies which attempt to address ‘learning’.
Ultralab’s Evidence of Learning Taxonomy:
One analytical tool recently developed in the UK in the context of work on the online programmes of the National College of School Leadership is Ultralab’s ‘Evidence of Learning Taxonomy’ (see Bradshaw et al 2002). It heavily builds on Gillian Salmon’s taxonomy of active and interactive thinking (2002). In order to be able to make judgements about the wider applicability of Ultralab’s – as well as any other – taxonomy across different cmc contexts, it is important to note its developmental context. Ultralab’s taxonomy was developed on the basis of provision of online community space for a specific group of educational professionals, namely existing and aspiring head teachers. It is underpinned by a constructivist orientation and features communication tools allowing asynchronous activity (such as self-contained discussions and so-called hot-seats by guest experts) and emphasises facilitation, mentoring and tutoring. Importantly for purposes of transfer to academic contexts there was no imperative of assessment and qualification underpinning the conception of the programme. Potential weaknesses of the dataset underpinning the Ultralab taxonomy are evidenced in the following passage from the Ultralab report:
The use of such spaces allows the learners to develop their knowledge, together applying it to the real problems they face in their professional contexts. It does not presuppose that this knowledge is external to the learners, rather it provides a medium to synthesise and develop that which is already known. … our philosophy is to aim for a learner-managed programme with open-ended tasks. (Bradshaw et al 2002: 8)
In other words, there is a danger of adopting an approach that is predicated on self-referential reflection and a lack of reference to existing bodies of conceptual and theoretical knowledge available, for example, in specialist and professional literature. Interestingly, the effectiveness of the use of guest experts and tutor facilitation to stimulate dialogue calls into question some of the tenets quoted above (i.e. learner-managed; relative unimportance of knowledge external to the learner). Also, colleagues involved in online learning provision will know that open-ended tasks are notoriously problematic in terms of fostering lively and sustained electronic debate. Nevertheless, all that said, we deem the ‘Evidence of Learning Taxonomy’ proposed by Bradshaw et al (2002: 12) to have some merit and potential for explaining certain types and aspects of computer-mediated learning, albeit in a modified form:
Table 2. Ultralab’s Evidence of Learning Taxonomy