Consumerism and its associated discourses have long been associated with schooling. Indeed, the curriculum of schooling has been said to produce a consumer citizen. In this paper, we consider the production of the consumer teacher by examining the role social media education influencers play in facilitating the relationship between market ideology and education. Through inquiry into publicly available Instagram posts shared by 18 education influencers comprising the popular United States-based P-12 educator collaborative, Teach Your Heart Out (TM), we explore how the discourses used in the figured world of P-12 teaching created by education influencers on Instagram ultimately produce a consumer teacher by emphasizing three key elements of consumerist ideology. We conclude with points of concern for the teaching profession that may arise from these consumer discourses, including the transformation of public education into a neoliberal, private investment.
Recognizing the role that online platforms hold in education, this study explores how three early career elementary teachers perceive the affordances and constraints of online curriculum sharing platforms. Using pedagogical design capacity as a theoretical framework, we engaged in a comparative qualitative case study to examine the ways early career teachers in differing contexts approach platforms like TeachersPayTeachers and Instagram. Findings emphasize the participants' perceived affordances and constraints of these platforms and the curricular materials found in these spaces. Additionally, we identify three distinct points of interest for the teaching profession and future research to better understand teachers' use of these platforms and the application of their pedagogical design capacity when working to supplement and design curriculum.
This conceptual chapter unravels the developing phenomenon of the teacher-to-teacher online marketplace of ideas (TOMI), a collection of online sites and social media platforms wherein teachers distribute and obtain, for free or at a cost, teaching-related ideas and materials. We discuss three prominent TOMI platforms: Teachers Pay Teachers, Pinterest, and Instagram. Next, we describe the ecological nature of the TOMI, identifying affordances and challenges that the proliferation of an interconnected web of social media platforms provides to teachers. Specifically, we consider the TOMI's neoliberal attributes and its ability to simultaneously push against and affirm neoliberal forces in education. We close with ways educational stakeholders might move forward when using the TOMI, particularly in terms of avoiding risks posed by the TOMI's expansive ecosystem.
Early life trauma impacts the HPA axis and can manifest as hyperactivity or a blunted activity. This study explored the types of trauma, age of trauma, and possible critical stages of development that impact different types of HPA axis function.
Educator engagement with social media's entrepreneurial and commercial facets has received limited scholarly attention. This conceptual paper defines and contextualizes the education influencer phenomenon in relation to literature on micro-celebrity, social media influencers, teacher social media use, teacher identity, and teacher entrepreneurship. Some educators use social media platforms to gain large audiences of followers, develop personal brands, and monetize their perceived influence. To illustrate the education influencer phenomenon, we provide empirical examples from our research. Education influencers can affect other educators' practices, philosophies, and professional identities. We consider implications of the rise of education influencers and discuss future research avenues.
Social media offers potential for educator professional learning, but platforms' for-profit nature complicates this practice, especially for professional learning around justice-oriented pedagogies. This exploratory study investigated 551 publicly available Instagram posts shared by 11 purposefully sampled, justice-oriented education influencers over an 8-week period as the COVID-19 pandemic and renewed activism for racial justice unfolded in the United States. Qualitative analysis of post content indicated these influencers offered pandemic-related support, while also illustrating, enacting, and engaging culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies. However, promotional content was abundantly layered within posts and a cohesive message of how to enact culturally sustaining pedagogies was largely absent. Reflecting some of the paradoxes of learning via social media, our findings suggest there is some opportunity for justice-oriented professional learning from social media, however education influencers' content is limited by platforms' opaque algorithms and for-profit business models, which govern what influencers post and what followers see.
The course-based research experience (CRE) with its documented educational benefits is increasingly being implemented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. This article reports on a study that was done over a period of 3 years to explicate the instructional processes involved in teaching an undergraduate CRE. One hundred and two instructors from the established and large multi-institutional SEA-PHAGES program were surveyed for their understanding of the aims and practices of CRE teaching. This was followed by large-scale feedback sessions with the cohort of instructors at the annual SEA Faculty Meeting and subsequently with a small focus group of expert CRE instructors. Using a qualitative content analysis approach, the survey data were analyzed for the aims of inquiry instruction and pedagogical practices used to achieve these goals. The results characterize CRE inquiry teaching as involving three instructional models: 1) being a scientist and generating data; 2) teaching procedural knowledge; and 3) fostering project ownership. Each of these models is explicated and visualized in terms of the specific pedagogical practices and their relationships. The models present a complex picture of the ways in which CRE instruction is conducted on a daily basis and can inform instructors and institutions new to CRE teaching.
Teacher protests across the country have garnered widespread attention. This qualitative study explores the role of four pre-service teachers (PSTs) in these protests by questioning what leads PSTs to join teacher rallies and examining how they perceived the impact of their participation on their personal and professional lives. Data sources include two semi-structured interviews using photo elicitation techniques where participants discussed pictures they shared from the rally. Using a socialization lens, we found the PSTs were motivated to protest by macro- (2016 election), exo- (media coverage) and micro-systems (role models) socialization. While the protest had differing impacts on each participant, the display of unity by teachers was profound. However, the professional impacts were limited based on each participant's prior socialization into the profession. Due to the promising influence of teacher educators on PST activism, we recommend teacher education take a more powerful role in the socialization of PSTs toward educational activism.
Teachers commonly use sites such as Pinterest, TeachersPayTeachers.com, and Instagram to support their lesson planning. Developing a critical lens toward the use of these sites in teacher education is imperative, yet little research has been published outlining how this might be done. This study investigates how 44 teacher candidates (TCs) across two methods courses altered their thinking about the use of sites such as Pinterest, TeachersPayTeachers.com, and Instagram after experiencing explicit instruction and practice in 21st-century critical curriculum literacy. Findings indicate that TCs developed a more critical lens toward these sites, yet the inclusion of critical pedagogical content knowledge within 21st-century critical curriculum literacy is essential to develop a critical lens toward specific resources. Implications include how teacher educators might continue to develop 21st-century critical curriculum literacy in TCs and directions for future research.
The Genomics Education Partnership (GEP) engages students in a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE). To better understand the student attributes that support success in this CURE, we asked students about their attitudes using previously published scales that measure epistemic beliefs about work and science, interest in science, and grit. We found, in general, that the attitudes students bring with them into the classroom contribute to two outcome measures, namely, learning as assessed by a pre- and postquiz and perceived self-reported benefits. While the GEP CURE produces positive outcomes overall, the students with more positive attitudes toward science, particularly with respect to epistemic beliefs, showed greater gains. The findings indicate the importance of a student's epistemic beliefs to achieving positive learning outcomes.
This study describes how three highly regarded instructors enact care in and out of the classroom. We first outline multiple theories of care in education-related literature. Then, using a multiple case study approach, we provide three vignettes of highly regarded instructors and their beliefs and practices regarding care in the college classroom. We term these three different enactments of care as critical maternal care, calculated care and neoliberal care. We make the case that these differing conceptions of care can serve as potential frameworks of care in higher education and are influenced by various factors including but not limited to instructors' teaching experience, disciplinary focus, gender, racial identity and approach to teaching.
Abstract The American Civil Rights Movement has often been misrepresented in textbooks, children’s literature, and other curricular materials. With knowledge of the ongoing curricular distortion around Black history in P-12 curricula in mind, this article explores how a commonly used social studies curriculum, Studies Weekly ®, represents the Civil Rights Movement in its Standing for Freedom Civil Rights curriculum package. Through a quantitative and qualitative content analysis, we reveal how the Studies Weekly ® Civil Rights Curriculum distorts the Civil Rights Movement history by centering a White ally, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland. Ultimately the curricular materials portray Mulholland as a central figure in the movement, thereby marginalizing Black activists and offering a narrative of the movement that relies nearly exclusively on Mulholland’s life and experiences. In doing so, we conclude, the Studies Weekly ® curriculum does harm to the civic learning and potential of all students by failing to offer an appropriate vision of White allyship and activism.
This research focuses on the Teacher-to-Teacher Online Marketplace of Ideas (TOMI), the popular ecosystem of participatory online platforms for teachers seeking to share and/or curate classroom materials and curricular ideas. Teachers engage with online platforms for curricular planning through multiple, complex labor practices. In this manuscript, interview data is used to describe the process teachers engage in when using the TOMI: Identifying, Remixing and Teaching, Reflecting, and Reviewing. We then consider how these new labor practices constitute a new type of work intensification that is both richly complex and concerning due to their market orientation. We trouble these findings, considering teachers' labor practices as examples of unpaid, casual digital labor in light of efforts to defund public education. We argue for structural shifts in public education that allow teachers more time and space for productive, creative, and fulfilling work remixing their curriculum and collaborating with colleagues in the digital space.
This paper explores the American Girl book series and its relation to the history of American education and the school’s role in the creation of the ideal American girl. Focused on the Kirsten Larson series of American Girl books, this paper explores how the settler grammars that characterize Kirsten’s encounters with an “Indian girl” named Singing Bird become entangled with the institution and ideologies of schooling to produce a certain vision of the American girl, both in the books. I argue that the author’s use of settler grammars to promote the Native Protestant Ideology throughout the series teaches Kirsten not only lessons about citizenship and morality, but the role schools should play in cultivating certain citizenship beliefs and traits in American schoolchildren. In particular, the books in the Kirsten series promotes the myth of the innate superiority of white immigrants and Native Protestant culture over the Indigenous peoples, cultures, and lands those immigrants colonized. Living in story, these representations and ideologies continue the ongoing work of colonization in a settler nation as American schoolchildren today continue to consume these oppressive narratives wrapped neatly under the title “American Girl.”
Background/Context: Opting out of high-stakes standardized tests, a phenomenon so widespread in the United States as to be regarded as a movement, is nevertheless a misunderstood and often maligned force in educational politics. Purpose: This article offers a counternarrative of opt-out activism-a more thorough and vivid account of what we view as an unfairly maligned movement with tremendous potential for improving and preserving our nation's schools. Participants: In-depth portraits introduce three members of the Opt Out Florida Network: Cindy Hamilton, an unabashed leader whose children have graduated: Sandy Stenoff, her partner in protest whose children remain in the system; and. Susan Bowles, who grapples with conflicting roles of pedagogue and protester. Research Design: As a critical ethnography, this study uses a qualitative approach to expose and challenge the unjust treatment of the opt-out movement, guided by the following research questions: 1) How do opt-out activists understand and explain their journeys to activism? 2) What experiences, concerns, and commitments guide them in their daily fight against high-stakes standardized testing? Data Collection and Analysis: Using transcript data from focus group and 1-on-1 follow-up phone interviews, the research team composed and analyzed narrative portraits, which offer models of resistance to neoliberal education reform. Conclusions: Contrary to their portrayal as passive, anti-test, anti-accountability parents solely focused on their own children, the opt-out movement is an active community of highly informed individuals dedicated to effecting positive change in education. The nuance of narrative captures the messy realities of activism, illustrating how parents and teachers must work together, guided by a view of citizenship as shared fate, to fight for more equitable and educative schools.
This study investigated approaches to the elementary social studies methods syllabus from instructors of courses across the United States. Using qualitative content analysis, we explored 48 methods syllabi using a deductive framework of Information Based Systems of education, Transformation Based Systems of Education, and Inquiry Based Systems of education. Ultimately, we determined that over half (n = 27) of the collected syllabi reflected an Information Based System of education meant to prepare students for certification, lesson and unit planning, and best practice social studies instruction. Fewer (n = 14) prepared pre-service teachers to challenge official knowledge and position social studies instruction within socio-political realities of students and fewer still prepared pre-service teachers to center inquiry-based instruction guided by the C3 Framework (n = 11). We position these findings within dominant trends in elementary social studies scholarship and conclude that too few methods courses reflect the scholarly trend toward transformative, justice-oriented, or inquiry-based elementary social studies.
Pinterest, a popular social networking site, is used as a resource by educators across all grade levels. We take the perspective that Pinterest acts as a professional learning network (PLN) and interrogate the ways that teachers share resources within online/offline PLNs. Eighty-eight teachers responded to a survey that asked about their social media use as well as their sharing of Pinterest resources with their professional colleagues. Building from the media use typology, we developed the Peer-to-Peer Pinterest Sharing Typology to describe types of sharing, finding that most respondents indicated that they did not share resources, others shared if forced to, and some shared as a way to enhance collegial collaboration. This research expands limited empirical work on both Pinterest as a PLN and on how learning and resources from online PLNs cross into school-based ones. This work will be of interest to those who seek to understand how social media sites play a role in teacher professional learning.
This comparative case study explored pre-service teachers' (PSTs) understandings and concerns around creating inclusive classrooms before and after engaging in explicit instruction and practice surrounding issues of inclusion in elementary social studies methods. Findings illustrate that PSTs understood inclusion as an expansive concept, encapsulating various social identities, before and after explicit instruction. Engaging in a lesson planning project involving children's literature and a deep dive into anti-bias and inclusion literature helped to lessen concerns held by PSTs about creating inclusive classrooms but amplified other concerns, such as how to manage parental pushback and how to support students of marginalized backgrounds. This chapter addresses implications for elementary social studies teacher educators, such as the need to provide explicit practice and guidance when emphasizing the need for inclusive classroom communities, and the authors suggest ways PSTs' concerns could be lessened through interviews with parents and panel discussions with inclusive educators.
This article explores how moral madness manifests in the Opt Out Florida Network, a group committed to ending high-stakes standardized testing. Using data culled from a critical online ethnography of the movement, we show how parents and teachers in the Opt Out Florida Network experience moral madness as a result of standardization and high-stakes accountability in U.S. schools. Our findings, positioned within the neoliberal policy environment, reflect a larger state of crisis in the education profession, wherein both teachers and parents find their autonomy and expertise devalued. Repositioning our participants' madness as moral injury, we recommend democratic pathways to healing.