Teaching About Teaching Using Technology: Using Embodiment to Interpret Online Pedagogies of Teacher Education

Abstract

In this chapter, our aim is to consider the ways in which collaborative self-study helped us to disrupt our assumptions and deepen our understandings of the challenges of teaching about teaching online. We take up Zeichner’s (J Teach Educ 58:36–46, 2007) challenge to make connections across self-studies that we have conducted both individually and collaboratively. Specifically, we use theories of embodiment to highlight how teaching using digital technologies poses significant challenges to the ways in which our pedagogies of teacher education are enacted. In particular we focus upon our experiences of the ways that relationships are formed and emotions communicated when digital technologies provide the main context for teaching and learning. Data were gathered using reflective journal entries, emails to one another, and recorded video conversations (e.g., Skype). Bullock and Ritter’s (Stud Teach Educ 7:171–181, 2011) notion of turning points was employed as an analytic guide, where we identified instances when collaborative self-study allowed us to come to new understandings of teacher education practice. The first finding is that asynchronous teaching-learning platforms create salient challenges for both teacher educators and teacher candidates/teacher education students in terms of developing and maintaining agentic relationships. The absence of “real-time” communications in asynchronous online courses often means that participants cannot convey or react to pedagogical situations in ways that include emotions as integral parts of the teaching-learning process. For instance, Tim felt that he had limited control and agency over how his tone (both verbally and non-verbally) was communicated to students, which he felt positioned him as a more authoritarian teacher educator. This led to our second main finding, which is that embodiment (and the ways that technologies influence or shape embodied interactions) has strong implications for the ways in which identities are formed in teacher education. As teacher education programs are increasingly required to offer more flexible and accessible platforms, our self-study suggests that this comes along with problematic and challenging situations for both teacher educators and their students.