Now the 2 weeks of the first ONL202 topic “Digital literacies” have almost passed! The work in our PBL group has been fun and rewarding, and it feels like I have known the group for longer than I actually have. Exploring the topic has certainly taken some time but the activities of these past weeks have already given me concrete thoughts and ideas to implement in my teaching!
I am a visitor… this is what I have realized reflecting about my own digital literacies. At least for my private digital life. And maybe I like it this way. However, professionally, I believe now more there are benefits to moving towards the resident role.
If you are not on the ONL202 course, you probably wonder: visitor and resident derive from the model White and Le Cornu 1 proposed for categorizing online engagement: it includes several axes, accounting for “people behaving in different ways when using technology, depending on their motivation and context, without categorising them according to age or background”.
It made sense to me and was in the back of my head when I needed to reflect about my general development as a teacher in another context. For teacher development, among others Kugel propose five stages of teacher’s development 2. In short, these stages are: 1) The teacher focuses on him/herself; 2) The focus turns to the subject; 3) Focus on the student as “receptive”; 4) Focus on the active student; 5) Focus on the independent student.
I can recognize parts of my own development in this. It is suggested that teachers can move through these phases faster through own education and reflection 3. But, if I understand Kugel correctly, these stages resemble a ladder, happening one after each other and one at a time 2. Is this really so or is this maybe too simplified?
To me, this resembles the discussion about digital literacies. There can e.g. be a difference in digital literacy for personal or professional use and what tool we talk about; they are context-dependent. David White himself described the development as visitor/resident within his model as “messy”, changing over time and dependent on situation and context 4, and maybe this can also be true for the development as a teacher?
I think the context can also change when we develop as teachers in general. New lectures, new contents, new student groups, new tools, changed premises. And a good example has been this spring when Corona forced us to move online – our tools changed! I believe many, also well-experienced “Kugel stage-5 teachers” were “thrown” back to the early stages, at least for a while: How do I use Zoom? Is the light/background ok for this? Am I looking OK!? 5 What do I do without a black or white board? How can I activate the students to discuss and to engage in an online lecture?
I believe we as teachers can be in different developmental stages simultaneously, dependent on the context. So in our new reality, with changing requirements and at the end for sure more tools to choose from and to master, our development as teachers has maybe become a bit more “messy”. This should of course not discourage us but make us bold enough to try to learn to move around and master new and different challenges as good as we can.
1 White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).
2 Kugel, P. (1993). How professors develop as teachers. Studies in Higher Education, 10 (1), 75-97.
3 Elmgren, M. & A.-S. Henriksson (2010). “Universitetspedagogik.” Norstedts förlag.
4 Webinar in the ONL202 course, Sept 28th 2020
5 https://www.insider.com/why-you-stare-at-yourself-zoom-calls-psychologist-2020-4
