A tech-tonic shift: the complex dance of technology-enabled-learning and academic identity work in higher education (original) (raw)
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The imagined and the real: identifying the tensions for academic identity
Higher Education Research & Development, 2010
Changes within the higher education sector have had significant effects on the identity of the individual academic. As institutions transform in response to government‐driven policy and funding directives, there is a subsequent impact upon the roles and responsibilities of those employed as educational professionals. Academic practices are changing as multiple roles emerge from the reshaping of academic work. Institutional pressures to produce specific research outputs at the same time as teaching and undertaking managerial/administrative responsibilities are creating tension between what academics perceive as their professional identity and that prescribed by their employing organisation. Reconciling this disconnect is part of the challenge for academics, who are now seeking to understand and manage their changing identity. Narratives obtained from research in a university with a polytechnic background and an institute of technology (aspiring to be a university), provide some subjective reflections for examining this issue.
New technologies, new identities: the university in the informational age
Education in Cyberspace, 2004
Review by Sue Clegg in Teaching in Higher Education, 2006, vol 11 (1): "The first chapter, which introduces some of the macro-level themes which infuse the whole volume, is by Caroline Pelletier and named ‘New technologies, new identities: the university in the informational age’. In fact it might be better to describe the title as a misnomer, since in fact Pelletier produces a highly nuanced critique of some of the over-simple constructions of the notion of the ‘informational age’. Her account quite rightly notes that some of the most influential writing about the university and knowledge production, by writers such as Gibbons and Barnett, have largely failed to theorise the role played by technology. Indeed one could argue that this is a characteristic of the higher education field as a whole where thinking about technology relations appears to have been hived off into a specialist sub-set of the overall higher education literature. This lack of engagement she attributes, in part, to the weakness of much of the educational technology literature, which has concentrated on the technological capacities for supporting student learning. Her hypothesis is rather that the way technology is realised is as an ideology (in Barnett's sense) and that therefore universities have choices. Decisions about technology are political. One aspect that makes Pelletier's chapter so refreshing is that she holds many of the terms of the debate in contradiction. In dealing with globalisation, rather than taking it as an accomplished fact, she carefully distinguishes between sociological analyses, which put an emphasis on space-time compression, and globalisation as a neo-liberal political project. She argues that to conflate them results in a misrecognition of the choices open to the university. By disaggregating some of the rhetoric of globalisation she is able to point to the ways in which: Risk, complexity, the fragmentation of identity, may be cultural phenomena but they can be deployed as political strategies. Uncertainty is not politically innocent. Whilst it is liberating for some, it is debilitating for others. (p. 14) The orientation of the university towards globalisation is above all political. By positioning themselves as if they were above politics and striving to preserve academic autonomy, universities have not resisted the pressures of the state. In this she notes: Yet it is precisely this attempt to remain a-political that is so clamorously partisan. The values which the university is adopting in a globalized world – performativity, the mercantilization of knowledge, the extension of property rights to intellectual matters – are those which have shrunk the measure of what is valuable in the university to what is productive economically. (p. 15) By a series of careful deconstructions, including a welcome critique of Castells, Pelletier is able to establish the ways in which technology itself becomes a political, not a technological choice. To give one example, she argues that the potentiality of hypertext may involve the infinite deferral of meaning, but that in practice computers often act to close down creativity. Inspecting the technology will not allow us to determine this, only a close scrutiny of the social and political context. In the paper she examines different blue prints of the university and its technology relations: the mega-university, the cosmopolitan project and the more techno-phobic university of dissensus, in order to show the flaws in all three. All treat the university as having little identity of its own and as being only responsive, thereby de-politicising the university. In contrast she argues for the political nature of the choices which new technology present. All this is entirely welcome and the chapter cleverly weaves between technology literature and those dealing with globalisation and the meaning of the university. I confess to some frustration, however, because by presenting ‘the’ university as a hyperstatised unity she misses out on the conflicts over meaning within the university itself. She is thus unable to identify the sorts of agents, and indeed the sorts of social and political conditions, under which other political choices, and from which other political outcomes, might flow. There is a tantalising reference to feminism at the end of the chapter, but she fails to note that many early feminist interventions took place contra the university, and also the ways in which feminism inside the academy was transmogrified. Despite these reservations the chapter is a tour de force of analysis and I chose it, in part, to illustrate the ways in which this book about cyberspace will be of interests to readers who would never dream of reading about e-learning or virtual learning environments. Her arguments are important precisely because of the ways they address the politics of the university and, as she rightly points out, technology is now part of that politics."
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Teaching in Higher Education, 2020
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Digital Identity and Teachers’ Roles: A Post-COVID-19 Vision
Academia Letters, 2021
Throughout their education and practice, teachers develop an awareness and understanding of themselves as a teacher that is called "professional identity." In other words, "professional identity" is the individuals' self-perceptions about themselves their professional domain (Wertsch, Tulviste, & Hagstrom, 1993). This can be broken down into the beliefs, values, and commitments one maintains as the result of being a professional, i.e., being a teacher, being an engineer, or being a mechanic to make him/herself distinct from those of other professions. Teacher's identity is the result of the interaction among context, change, and relationships aimed at making meanings (Rogers & Scott, 2008). When and if any of these interacting factors undergo some sort of modifications, the whole process of making meanings is thereby affected. For example, if a teacher's work context is changed from high school to higher education (HE), his/her whole process of making and transferring of meanings is duly altered. The same thing could happen if a teacher gets a promotion from being a teacher to being a school principal. By the same token and as an example, if the general curriculum changes, there will certainly be modifications and changes in the way teachers endeavor to make meanings. Technology was in use in teaching and learning since radio and TV came into use. In fact, by using these media it became possible to teach to large numbers of people. However, the second half of the 20th century witnessed massive technological developments which made the available technology much cheaper, and as a result, more available. The advent of the Internet revolutionized the degree of accessibility and forms and modes of communication. This revolution has not ceased yet; use of information and communication technologies has become omnipresent in many different fields including education and thereby has been quite instrumental in the development of a phenomenon that is called "digital identity". Similar to
Who Am I Here? Disrupted Identities and Gentle Shifts When Teaching in Cyberspace
2014
Teacher identity has most often been studied in reference to teacher candidates (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009; Franzak, 2002; Freese, 2006; Hoban, 2007; Murrell, Diez, Feiman-Nemser, & Schussler, 2010; Sachs, 2005), in the area of literacy learning and its connection to teacher identity (Moje, 2008; Spitler, 2009, 2011), and in regards to teachers’ professional development (Day, Stobart, Sammons, & Kingston, 2006; Trevitt & Perera, 2009; Watson, 2006). The research on teacher candidate and in-service teacher identity exists in contrast to the dearth of research on teacher identity in higher education, which has created a gap in establishing teacher identity issues across all forms of educational experiences. With the move to more online learning in higher education (Daughtery & Funke, 1998; Kazar & Eckel, 2002), specifically in the area of teacher education, studying the identity of teacher educators as both instructors and as literacy learners is an area of research that requires atten...