Questioning the character and significance of convergence between social network and professional practices in teacher education

Abstract

AbstractThis paper captures and characterises the interplay between a group of student teachers’ narratives of social network practice and their emergent professional practice with technologies. Teachers on an Initial Teacher Education programme in the UK spent a semester studying a module that synthesised university‐based lectures with a professional intervention using online communications technologies in a local primary school involving a class of 30 children (8–10 years). A narrative methodology was developed to capture and conceptualise the teachers’ perceptions of the experience. Teachers’ dispositions towards the appropriation of technologies were found to be as ubiquitous across social network and professional contexts as the technological tools themselves. However, the distinctly nuanced ways in which the teachers experienced the process of convergence raises questions with regard to the significance of such convergence and how we both capture and characterise convergence as a technological, cultural or agent‐centred process. The findings support the need for an agent‐centred view of convergence embedded within the wider socio‐cultural ecology that incorporates individuals’ engagement with media and social network practices.Practitioner Notes What is already known about this topic The development of professional practice and pedagogy with new technologies is a complex process. Teachers’ professional learning with new technologies is mediated by wider socio‐cultural contexts and the affordances of technologies. What this paper adds This paper provides fine‐grained empirical evidence of some of the ways in which professionals exert user agency over the technological tools they appropriate in their professional practice. A new narrative ecology methodology to make sense of how teachers might incorporate social networking technologies into their professional development and practice. Implications for practice and/or policy The need to recognise the significance of user agency in the ways in which technologies are appropriated into professional practice.