Teacher Networks and Digital Pedagogies: How Network Contexts Shape Digital IntegrationElizabeth C. HomanPhD, University of MichiganDigital Learning Specialist, Boston Public Schools@lizhoman / liz-homan.comehoman@bostonpublicschools.org

Theoretical Framework and Literature ReviewThe concept of “networks” as a way of thinking about our social connections is a

popular one these days. Unlike some other approaches to conceptualizing our social world, networks allow for more consideration of how communities and groups interact, overlap, or connect to one another. They call on us, as Latour (2007) argues, to “flatten” our social world, to trace how we are connected to others, or even to things, across time and space. Scholars from multiple fields have drawn on the concept of networks to frame their research, and their work shaped my approach to examining teacher practice in one Midwestern high school. I drew on Latour’s Actor Network Theory and Social Network Theory and Analysis in order to interrogate how teachers’ practice shaped and was shaped by the digital tools they employed in their professional lives. Latour’s theory challenges us, as Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton (2002) have argued, to reconceive of the “global” and the “local” as constantly in conversation with one another, as not easily separable or conceptually separate. As such, in examining teacher practice in a local context, I consistently questioned how teachers’ networked experiences with technology beyond the school context shaped their practice.

Social network analysis, a quantitative approach to analyzing network connections, allowed me to interrogate teachers’ uses of technology alongside their social connections. Ken Frank’s (1995) work emphasizes the role teachers’ informal social connections play in shaping their practice, arguing that these networks serve as better predictors of practice than institutionally-defined connections (such as departmental affiliation or position hierarchies). Using networks as a conceptual frame, I sought to examine how teachers were using digital technologies in their teaching. Scholars in literacy, writing, and English Education have argued that digital technologies are not simply streamlining our literate lives, but that digital spaces – particularly Web 2.0 spaces – are creating new literate “stuff,” to quote Lankshear and Knobel (2006).

Some of this “new literacy stuff” is technical, requiring us to learn how to operate, sync, and manipulate new devices, how to navigate and organize hard drives, or how to manage accounts and online identities. And some of this new stuff is “ethos stuff,” requiring us to learn what collaboration and co-constructed knowledge looks like in the 21st century. Understanding the ethical and societal ramifications of this “new ethos” is complicated; in a society where “free” and “open” is highly valued, major companies like Google challenge the very notion of “free” and “open” by gathering and profiting on human data while providing “free” web services, offering simultaneously “free,” “crowdsourced” spaces while also

making a profit in their work with public entities (like public schools). The “new ethos” of Web 2.0 technologies, Gee (2000, 2013) argues, calls on students to be “makers” and not simply consumers of web content. However, it is as yet unclear how to foster this “maker mindset” in the classroom, teaching students how to be critical consumers of web content that is simultaneously “free” and “open” and also proprietary. As Troy Hicks (2013) has argued, the question is no longer whether to engage students with the “stuff” of new literacies, but how to do so.

Studies have shown, and it stands to reason, that teachers need to engage in new literacy practices if they are to model these literate practices in the classroom or facilitate such practices in their classrooms. This begs the question: must teachers engage in the “maker movement,” becoming digital writers and conscientious consumers of web content, in order to best engage students in digital literacies? Ken Frank’s (2011) work with teacher networks and digital technologies supports this approach, noting the importance of time to experiment and play, or “fiddle” with, technologies, in order to foster digital integration. Work from National Writing Project scholars has similarly emphasized that teachers who are also regular readers and writers – or digital writers – are more equipped to model digital writing and reading and to foster authentic experiences with digital writing and reading. And as I will discuss, teachers in my study who wrote for their own purposes and developed social networks through digital writing were more likely to engage in practices that engaged students in new literacy practices.

<anecdote>Before I share the research questions and methods that guided my dissertation

study, I want to pause for a quick anecdote. In my work with Boston Public Schools, I design professional development for classroom technology integration. This means lots of principals come to our team for help when they want their teachers to be using more technology. Teachers and district-level administrators also approach our team for help with digital and online PD. Not long ago, a school with money to spend on new technology asked us to come in and spend three hours doing PD with their teachers. Their goal for the PD? They had not yet opened the Chromebook cart they had received the previous year, and wanted us to show them “how to use the Chromebooks.” The principal also wanted advice about what devices to purchase for their school. Not wanting to walk in and “train” teachers on a specific device, but wanting instead to challenge teacher pedagogy, my colleague and I asked what their major instructional goals for the year and conducted a survey with teachers to figure out what technologies they were already using – in their lives, and in their classrooms.

This approach initially came as a surprise to administrators and teacher leaders at the school, but once we arrived and started talking to them about how they were using technology and to what ends, even some of the most unsure teachers started embedding calendars into their student information system pages and annotating texts with Diigo, a social bookmarking tool. Such tasks are relatively “advanced” for new or reluctant users of technology, but when faced with a purpose for trying the technology, and when given directed choice about how to employ it, teachers were more willing to dive in.

</anecdote>

I will argue that in teachers’ social networks, this kind of purpose-driven learning is the norm, not the exception. Teachers seek out people and knowledge that can help them with a task they have in mind in that moment, right then. They obtain practices in response to their own goals. However, institutional PD around digital integration has yet to acknowledge and tap into this sort of networked knowledge generation and sharing. In my brief time at BPS, and in my research, interactions like these have been fairly typical. The mindset that knowing “how to use” a technology will lead to meaningful integration of that technology is fairly pervasive. However, I learned in my research that professional development that focuses on particular tools and “how to use them” misses the point when it comes to teaching digital literacies – to students and to teachers.

My research questions interrogated the role of teachers’ “informal,” or friend-and-colleague based, networks, asking how teachers’ social networks shape their digital literacy learning and, by extension, their pedagogical beliefs and practices. I also wanted to know, beyond networks, what other factors – spatial, institutional, or other – played a role in the change of teachers’ pedagogies when it came to technology:

1. How do teachers’ social networks shape their digital literacy learning and, by extension, their pedagogical beliefs and practices?

2. As teachers develop digital practices, what factors play a role in the development or change of teachers’ existing pedagogies?

MethodsBorealis High School, where I conducted my study, was dedicated to getting more

technology infused into their curriculum. The principal supported this in teachers’ professional learning communities (PLCs) and in PD breakout sessions, where teachers and administrators led workshops on how to use specific tools in the classroom. The school was not 1:1, but had instituted a “bring your own device” policy the year of my study, and teachers had access to computer carts on each floor, as well as a number of computer labs. The school was situated in a relatively affluent community close to a major Midwestern university.

I spent a semester at Borealis conducting a network analysis of the whole school with a qualitative focus on the English Department and, in particular, one PLC that called itself the “Digital Literacies Group” or “DigLit Group.” Specifically, I:• Conducted two network surveys, which asked teachers about their close colleague

connections, technology consultations, and curricular consultations, in addition to their practices with digital technologies (how often they used particular devices and technologies, and why).

• Interviewed members of the English department as well as the principal, a member of the science department, and a member of the math department.

• Identified four focal English teacher participants, with whom I engaged in classroom observations, curricular artifact collection, and in-depth interviews.

• Observed three digital literacies PLC sessions during the spring semester• Observed two PD breakout sessions in which teachers from the English department

shared how they were using Google Drive and Google Sites in the classroom with students.

As I collected both ethnographic and quantitative survey data, I analyzed it iteratively, moving between network graphs/quantitative analysis and qualitative thematic coding of observation and interview data. This allowed me to both identify key actors within the network and to analyze how network and institutional contexts shaped – or didn’t shape – teacher practice at Borealis. It also allowed me to compare practices that integrated technologies in different ways with the network connections of teachers, enabling me to correlate practices with networked and institutional learning opportunities.

Findings: Networks as Shapers of Facilitative and Integrative Approaches Ultimately, I developed a framework for thinking about and analyzing teachers’ practices with digital technologies (See Figure 1).

Figure 1: Facilitative and Integrative Approaches to Integrating Technologies

The framework distinguishes between those practices that primarily facilitate existing practices that could be done in analog and those teaching practices that fully integrate digital technologies with content and pedagogy, calling on students to think about and articulate the decisions they make about what technologies to use, to what ends, and why. Multiple frameworks have been developed, such as Mishra & Koehler’s (2006) TPACK framework, the Technology Integration Matrix, and the SAMR model, to explain differences in digital pedagogies. All of these models have argued that there is some sort of continuum of practice from early integration to full integration of technologies. While these models have been useful, they have not gained much of a foothold in the k-12 world, in part because of their conceptual weight and in part because of a strong k-12 culture around digital PD that focuses on “how-to” instead of “why-to” use digital technologies. Such frameworks, while conceptually useful and widely cited in scholarly literature, tend not to offer a concrete way for k-12 practitioners to look at teacher practice with technologies and ascertain what a technology is doing for student learning.

This framework, to some extent, emphasizes the technology itself – placing attention on what a technology is being used for and whether that use is in the service of student learning or in the service of other means, such as completing tasks central to the operation of a classroom or making classroom tasks more efficient. The categories are flexible and rest upon a spectrum, and can be used to describe specific teaching practices, not necessarily a whole teacher’s entire approach to integrating technology. Facilitative practices are those practices that primarily facilitate tasks that could be done in analog ways, but technology streamlines or enhances them in some way. Integrative practices, on the other hand, realize the call of the TPACK framework, integrating content, pedagogy, and technology by addressing and fostering the development of students’ digital literacies.

As I hope becomes clear, this framework does not seek to position facilitative practices as “bad” uses of technology in the classroom. Such practices are unavoidable. Teachers must, in many cases, use digital technologies to assess students or organize student information. However, it does seek to emphasize that not all uses of technology necessarily address the development of students’ digital literacies by calling on them to make decisions about and within digital technologies and tools.

The distinction I make between facilitative and integrative practices focuses on just that – practices that I witnessed as teachers assigned writing tasks, planned lessons, or designed assessments. I want to provide a couple of examples to make the distinction clear, but it’s important to keep in mind that many teachers engaged in both facilitative and integrative practices, and that these practices fell along a spectrum and often overlapped.

Kristin and Donna both used digital technologies to enhance assessment and instruction in their classrooms. Online forums allowed Kristin to continue developing an existing pedagogical practice – fostering discussion about literary texts – which did not require her to change her goals for her course or significantly alter her curriculum. For teachers like Kristin who were concerned about the “extra” (time, planning, learning) that might accompany digital integration, approaches like this work well for integrating technologies in ways that feel less “risky” than, for example, digital storytelling or blogging. Technologies in these cases facilitate those existing content-based pedagogical practices, without a lot of extra time or resources required. Forums fit into Kristin’s existing pedagogical goals, which included engaging students in regular discussion of literary texts, and in some cases were even able to extend and enrich Kristin’s ability to foster discussion.

Kristin noted that many students who would not have participated in class discussions before the introduction of forums were more likely to participate meaningfully and actively in online forum discussions, enabling her to assess discussion skills for all students more easily than she was able to without the forums:

I’ve seen our class discussions improve so much as we’ve been doing the forums too, and I’ve seen the forum discussions improve. This year, when I added the exit strategy piece, versus last year when I didn’t do that.

Further, as Kristin noted in her interview, forums ultimately improved her classroom discussions with students. Thus, uses of technology that facilitate existing practices still have the potential to transform teacher pedagogy in some ways, even if the use of the technology is primarily facilitating other goals or not necessarily contributing directly to students’ digital literacy learning.

Donna used Quia, an online assessment/quiz website, in a way similar to how Kristin used forums: to facilitate review of major concepts before a history test. In a lesson I observed, students rotated to different stations where they engaged with matching and quiz reviews in small groups, using the site to test their knowledge of World War II. Donna said of Quia in an interview:

Quia is probably the best new tool I've used this year and I really am sold on it… I mean again the kids are using it outside of my room, it's not happening in here, but it's just one more tool for them to get instant feedback, for me to instantly see okay they're getting it, [or if] they're not.

Though I witnessed students using Quia in class, Donna reported that she more frequently used Quia outside of class to help students review or to check their understanding of a major course concept. As in Kristin’s classroom, students used the site outside of classroom time and gave Donna “one more tool” for providing feedback to students.

Both of these uses of technology are facilitative because they primarily position the technology as separate from the classroom, as a supplement to the regular course curriculum and as a way to support an existing pedagogical approach, such as assessment or literature discussions. These practices were typical – even ubiquitous – among teachers at Borealis High School. Even if only to record grades or communicate with parents, all teachers used technology to facilitate tasks they would have needed to complete in analog without the available technology. Some teachers’ facilitative uses of technologies were also in some ways transformative for classroom practice: Donna was more able to give students quick feedback using Quia, which she argued improved student performance on end-of-unit assessments. Kristin similarly noted improved class discussions after students practiced strategies for extending discussions in the online space of the forums.

Though Kristin’s and Donna’s uses of technology in some ways transformed their approaches to teaching ELA, these practices were distinct from other uses of technologies that I witnessed in two of their colleagues’ classrooms. ELA teacher Mary engaged her students in a project at the end of each year that Mary called This I wish to Change. The project called on students to develop and enact an intervention in a community of their choosing and to write arguments for change in multiple media in order to enact their intervention, as Mary described when she said:

I've had some people who have started their own Facebook group to promote whatever material they have created. I have had some people present somewhere else and then share a link to something[…]. I have had some people that have done grass-roots kind of work and given flyers to their communities and spread it out that way.

The project was an extension of an assignment from earlier in the year, This I Believe, in which students recorded podcasts in the style of the popular This I Believe NPR radio show. The project required students to make choices about the mode and media in which they would compose, and Mary regularly called on students to reflect on their composition choices throughout the project.

Mary’s project is what I am calling integrative because it called on students to make and articulate decisions about when, whether, and why to use a particular technology as they engaged with disciplinary content – in this case, argumentative and persuasive writing. Further, this practice called on students to be “makers” in that it required them to identify an audience and a purpose for their creations and to produce digital (or non-digital) content and find a way to publish and disseminate it. Crystal VanKooten’s recent dissertation argued that digitally literate students show their digital composition knowledge through a combined process of doing, or actually composing in multiple media, and saying, or articulating the decisions they are making and why (2014). This combined process, she argues, shows students’ “meta-awareness” as they compose digitally. Both Mary and her math teacher colleague, Amanda, fostered such meta-awareness about technology in their practice, calling on students to both do and say in digital environments.

Amanda’s math classroom was “flipped,” which required students to learn from screencasts at home then come to class to engage in problem-based learning. Amanda described how she set students up to be successful learners with technology at the start of the school year and throughout the year by talking to them about “how they learned from a video versus a real person:”

And then that opens up a time for discussion about how you learned from the video versus a real person. How do you ask questions when it’s a video verses having a real person in front of you?

While flipped classroom models are gaining popularity, Amanda’s approach specifically engaged students in conversation about how they learned and took notes from digital content. Students in Amanda’s classroom also maintained blogs where they worked through and reflected on difficult mathematical concepts and how those concepts related to the world around them. Such practice called on students to be “makers” and to build their meta-awareness about the role of technology in their mathematical learning.

The distinction I am making here between facilitative and integrative approaches to using technologies is a subtle one, but I believe an important one. It might be easy for an administrator to walk into the classroom of any one of these teachers and to see “integration” happening. All of these teachers’ classrooms featured assignments that engaged students with digital tools and technologies. All of these teachers believed digital technologies were an important component of their practice and thought it important for students to build their comfort and facility in digital environments.

However, the implications for students’ development of digital literacy strategies are many when one considers how these two types of digital practice are different (see Figure 2). Facilitative pedagogies, though they integrate technologies, do not necessarily call on students to think about the digital platforms with they are engaging disciplinary content. The technology in facilitative classrooms becomes somewhat “invisible” to students, as they use it without discussing it or problematizing it. Conversely, in classrooms where technologies are integrated into the very fabric of day-to-day classroom operations, students are called upon to think about how content and technology come together, to both make and to articulate how they make digital content, on a regular basis.

Figure 2: Distinctions between facilitative and integrative pedagogies

Such practice realizes the Common Core’s call for students to be strategic users of digital technologies, but more importantly, it draws on what many students are already doing outside of the classroom and will be called upon to do in the 21st century workplace – becoming strategic “makers” and not simply “consumers” of digital content.

Beyond analyzing teacher pedagogies, I also closely examined teacher networks and how these corresponded with teachers’ uses of digital technologies. When comparing teachers in the English department, some major distinctions between those teachers who more frequently engaged in integrative practice emerged. These teachers, like Mary, maintained extensive in-and-out-of-school professional networks that supported teachers’ digital writing and digital learning. The network image below serves as one example: Allison’s tech consultation network with colleagues in Borealis included most members of the English department in addition to colleagues across the school in other departments.

Figure 3: Allison's "tech consultation network" within Borealis High School. Node colors represent departmental affiliation, node size represents number of nominations from colleagues on network survey

Further, Allison’s online social networks – both in social media and from the blogging communities she maintained – gave her the space to hone her own digital writing

knowledge, which she was then able to pull into lessons about blogging and writing digital texts in her American Literature classes. Further, for teachers who regularly engaged in integrative practices, the school often legitimized and upheld these practices as examples of effective practice, fostering their confidence and enabling them to continue taking risks in their classrooms. This was certainly the case for Allison, whose administrators called upon her to present to the school board and to lead PD sessions during my time at Borealis.

However, such institutional legitimization worked as something of a double-edged sword at Borealis, boosting the confidence of some teachers while others struggled to access the “hubs of digital knowledge” within the school. In the English department specifically, teachers who more frequently engaged in integrative practices were in the “digital literacies PLC,” which focused specifically on the integration of digital technologies. Members of this PLC were called upon by administrators and their colleagues to lead efforts to infuse technology into teacher practice throughout the school; these teachers led breakout sessions during full-faculty professional development days and were nominated by their colleagues as individuals they would consult with regularly about technology.

Figure 4: English Department DigLit PLC as a "hub" of digital knowledge. Bold lines represent reciprocal collegial ties in the "technology consultation" network

The result of this was a tightly-knit group in the English department that was recognized for their digital “savvy” throughout the school (see Figure 2). While this was not problematic in and of itself, it did result in tension within the English department at times. Donna noted that she often felt left out of decisions surrounding technology, and Kristin struggled to access hardware as her more digitally savvy colleagues often reserved computer carts and labs before she could do so. A “hub” of digital expertise emerged in my network analysis, a hub that served both as a resource to teachers throughout the school and as a source of social tension within the English department, as some teachers felt alienated by their more adeptly-digital colleagues.

Discussion and ImplicationsThese findings suggest that PD focused on teaching teachers how to use a specific

software or device “misses the point,” in that it misses the opportunity to teach teachers how to be the types of digital problem-solvers that Mary required her students to be in her This I Wish to Change project. Today’s teachers need to be able to model how to do and say in digital environments, which may mean that they need to become digital writers themselves, asked to “fiddle” and “play” during professional development time. In order to

foster this type of literacy and pedagogical learning for teachers, our team has begun building such time for “focused play” and digital composition into PD we design for Boston Public School teachers, but a constant struggle exists between the need for teachers to both learn how to use various technologies and to learn how to use them strategically in order to model digital literacy practices in their classrooms. In short, teachers I have worked with constantly feel as though they are “catching up” with their students, unable to keep the pace with kids who are already, in many ways, “makers” of digital content. As a result, this PD sometimes looks “messy” as we run around answering functional questions alongside pedagogical ones during “focused play” time – however, I would argue that this is just the type of maker-space we want to encourage teachers to foster in their own classrooms.

Some teachers, like Mary and Amanda and a number of teachers I have worked with in Boston, have embraced becoming learners in their classrooms, letting students take over instruction and encouraging them to teach one another how to do new things in digital environments, creating these “messy” learning spaces. These teachers become true facilitators in their classrooms, asking students about their decisions and structuring their classes without needing to be “digital experts.” However, this sort of practice often feels risky to teachers tasked with raising student performance on standardized tests. For teachers at Borealis, student performance was tied into their evaluations, making the stakes even higher as teachers worked to balance aligned and highly linear curricula with a desire to foster students’ digital literacies – an often messy and difficult-to-structure process.

ReferencesBrandt, D., & Clinton, K. (2002). Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as a

Social Practice. Journal of Literacy Research, 34(3), 337–56.

Frank, K. A. (1995). Identifying cohesive subgroups. Social Networks, 17(1), 27–56.

doi:10.1016/0378-8733(94)00247-8

Frank, K. A., Zhao, Y., Penuel, W. R., Ellefson, N., & Porter, S. (2011). Focus, Fiddle, and

Friends Experiences that Transform Knowledge for the Implementation of

Innovations. Sociology of Education, 84(2), 137–156.

doi:10.1177/0038040711401812

Gee, J. P. (2000). Teenagers in New Times: A New Literacy Studies Perspective. Journal of

Adolescent &amp; Adult Literacy, 43(5), 412–420.

Hicks, T. (2013). Crafting digital writing: composing texts across media and genres.

Hicks, T., Turner, K. H., & Fink, L. S. (2013). No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can’t Wait.

English Journal, High School Edition, 102(6), 58–65.

Hicks, T., Turner, K. H., & Stratton, J. (2013). Reimagining a writer’s process through digital

storytelling. LEARNing Landscapes, 6(2), 167–183.

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2011). New literacies. Berkshire, England ; New York: Open

University Press.

Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford

University Press, USA.

VanKooten, C. L. (2014) Developing Meta-Awareness about Composition through New Media

in the First-Year Writing Classroom. Dissertation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press.

Zhao, Y., & Frank, K. A. (2003). Factors Affecting Technology Uses in Schools: An Ecological

Perspective. American Educational Research Journal, 40(4), 807–840.