May 29, 2021
As Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel (2018) have argued, teaching in higher education is a precarious act, one that receives little support and institutional value despite how crucial the teaching and learning experience is to student success. Despite its precarity, many faculty are deeply invested in their students and their teaching practices, and develop their practices however they can. Sometimes this is through teaching and learning centers and conferences, if these options are available to them and match their needs.
Increasingly, faculty are turning to Twitter to listen in on teaching discussions resource-sharing, finding that this sometimes messy and chaotic space is a tremendously useful network, even a caring community. I have seen tweets like these so often, one appearing from Susan Blum, the editor of Ungrading book Susan Blum, and another from David Buck, the organizer of an open, Twitter-based Ungrading Book Club.
Twitter provides access to more people and ideas, often the source of more up-to-date information than we will receive in other channels. But there is something more to teaching culture on Twitter that makes people feel freer to speak even though they do so on a worldwide stage, such as described by Maha Bali in her announcement Voices of Practice:
"I am quite vocal, but sometimes I do things that I think might get me into trouble and I don't talk about them too loudly in my institution. Only on Twitter and my blog and in front of the world." - Maha Bali
A growing body of research investigates teachers’ experiences on Twitter, but I want to better understand how the culture of higher ed “Teaching Twitter” produces such a rich, relevant learning environment for faculty. While many experiences are positive, I also want to capture areas of tension, struggle, exclusion, and imperfection. As a digital ethnography, this study will describe its norms, values, language and other aspects that make this community what it is.
As a faculty developer myself, I think such an understanding could inform how educational developers and instructional designers cultivate learning ecologies (Hollett & Kalir, 2017) for faculty at our own institutions and beyond. Without taking away on-campus opportunities, faculty development has so much to do to cultivate online spaces for faculty to talk to one another and belong to a teaching community.
I hope this study helps us better understand the workings of online communities on social networks like Twitter and how we can use them to build our own learning spaces, either as faculty developers, faculty, or as lifelong learners in general.
Bali, M. (2021 March 16). Announcing Voices of Practice. Hybrid Pedagogy.
Hollett, T., & Kalir, J. H. (2017). Mapping playgrids for learning across space, time, and scale. TechTrends, 61, 236-245. DOI:10.1007/s11528-016-0138-0
Matson, T., & Clark, J. (2020 February 26). Improve student outcomes by building caring faculty relationships. Gallup Education.
Morris, S. M., & Stommel, J. (2018). An urgency of teachers: The work of critical digital pedagogy. Hybrid Pedagogy.
Feel free to follow up with me on Twitter or email me at christinamoorephd@gmail.com