SOCIAL MEDIA
Links are made between education and democratic participation, and there is encouragement of increased political awareness and activity by teachers and learners, locally and globally. A significant theme is advocacy for the positive impacts of FE beyond the world of work and the individual learner, extending to the family, the community, between generations and to wider society. An important initial role for the 26 interview and focus group participants was memberchecking of the three-lens model. Participants included teachers, teacher educators and managers, who spanned regular and occasional Twitter contributors and new and longstanding community users, and also engaged two community founder/moderators. Participants report that the three-lens model describes accurately their impressions of dialogues in educators’ Twitter communities. Participants also engaged with the research question: How do FE teachers who participate in online educators’ networks consider that they are engaging in meaningful professional learning? Participants report that they gain meaningful professional learning by engaging in discussions on pedagogy, sharing resources, reading and practical strategies and consulting peers on emerging challenges. They were ‘given practical ideas’, had existing ways of working ‘challenged’ and were ‘exposed to new thinking’. Teachers valued a break from ‘stuckness in organisational thinking’, using words including ‘mobilise’, ‘buoyancy’ and ‘connecting’ to describe Twitter community participation. They spoke of ‘contextualised’ discussions allowing them to ‘reclaim professionality’ to escape from ‘silo mentalities’ when a
Figure 1: Three-lens model
Identity and voice lens
Learning community lens
‘how we define our values and advocate for them’
‘how we connect and support each other to develop’
Pedagogy lens ‘what we do in evidenceinformed practice’
shortage of inter-organisation learning dialogues made work ‘very isolating’. Many were critical of compliance-focused, generic CPD they had undertaken that did not meet their learning needs, calling sessions on use of data systems or standardised documents ‘training, not learning’. Twitter communities give teachers an opportunity to set their own learning agenda, ask relevant questions, seek peers’ advice and engage in self-selected dialogues. Though findings suggest that outcomes from Twitter community participation are largely positive, some interviewees encountered challenging behaviour described as ‘boisterous mansplaining’ or reported ‘highly engaged contributors’ getting ‘out of hand’. A moderator notes an occasional need to remind ‘those who kick off ’ during animated dialogues that ‘teachers are role models’. Twitter community thread topics correspond well to professional development areas set out in the ETF’s Professional Standards, providing participants DR LYNNE with challenging, contextualised, TAYLERSON is a teacher on-demand learning dialogues. educator, mentor Dialogues plant the seeds of new and director of practice but Coffield (2017: p41) independent reminds us that ‘transformative training provider Real Time change’ is a two-stage process. Education. With Educators’ dialogues the support of the ‘generate new knowledge ETF’s Practitioner among themselves’, provoking Research ‘new actions’. Collaboration Programme, Dr Taylerson has must be actioned practically undertaken a PhD or teachers will be ‘sharing, through SUNCETT but not implementing, good at the University practice’ (ibid: xiii); a challenge, of Sunderland
THE KNOWLEDGE
which brings us to a final, problematic research question: What evidence do educators report of any formal recognition of impact from informal online learning opportunities? This research discovered little evidence that teachers document informal online dialogues in their CPD records or acknowledge them as a source of professional learning. A sole interviewee reports Twitter dialogues as CPD thinkpieces for teacher education groups and acknowledges them to colleagues as sources of reading and resources. This is a ‘Catch 22’, in a sector which prizes immediate impact on learner outcomes as a requirement for teachers’ CPD. Further research is needed on the impact of informal learning dialogues, online and off. As Eraut notes (2004: p249), ongoing, spontaneous, informal learning is ‘largely invisible… taken for granted or not recognised’. I invite inTuition readers to respond to this research with their experiences of informal online learning via Twitter @realtimeedu.
References and further reading Bergviken-Rensfeldt A, Hillman T and Selwyn N. (2018) Teachers ‘liking’ their work? BERJ 44(2): 230-250. Coffield F. (2017) Will the Leopard Change Its Spots? A new model of inspection for Ofsted. London: UCL IoE Press. Cormier D. (2008) Rhizomatic education: community as curriculum. Innovate: Journal of Online Education 4(5): 2. Eraut M. (2004) Informal learning in the workplace. Studies in Continuing Education 26(2): 247-273. Hammersley M. (2012) Methodological Paradigms in Educational Research. London: BERA. Kozinets RV. (2010) Netnography. Doing ethnographic research online. California: Sage.
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