Abstract
This chapter presents relevant findings from research that explored literacy teachers' self-reflections and reflective discussions with peers that were mediated by digital video. Mixed methodological approaches were used, including statistical discourse analysis, which examines the relations between speech-turns in teachers' video discussions to provide a fine-grained view of digital video's mediating role. Findings showed that recursive viewing of videos, across different contexts or within a context facilitated shifts in purposes for discussing videos and broadened the foci of these discussions. Additionally, the situated context and multiple modes of information presented in digital videos supported literacy teachers' generation and application of ideas about reader processing and reader engagement. Teachers used certain conversation moves, such as critical thinking, hypothesizing, and challenging, as they transacted with the multimodal information in the video to support their generation of ideas for literacy instruction. Implications and future research directions are discussed.
TopBackground
This section presents research that positions digital video as a tool in teacher education that enables authentic, context-oriented, reflective practice within a collaborative and social environment. First, multimodal literacies and transactional perspectives are presented to contextualize the use of digital videos in teacher education. Second, the advantages of digital video for facilitating teachers’ learning are discussed. Third, research on video mediated self-reflections and reflection with peers is examined that offers multiple ways of using digital videos in teacher education.
Theoretical Perspectives
From a multimodal literacies perspective (e.g., Kalantzis & Cope, 2008), digital videos act as a form of “text” with which viewers can transact and construct meaning. This is similar to how readers engage in “complex, nonlinear, recursive” transactions with traditional text (Rosenblatt, 2004, p. 1371). However, digital video captures multiple modes of information (visual and auditory) that can present more complex pathways for processing information than transcriptions of oral accounts of teaching events alone (Kress, 2010; Wolfe & Flewitt, 2010). For example, video affords opportunities to attend to many multimodal aspects of teaching events, such as facial expressions, gestures, and verbal interactions (Brophy, 2004; Koc, Peker, & Osmanoglu, 2009; Sherin & Han, 2004). Thus, digital video grounds discussions in ways that are “virtually impossible when referents are remote or merely rhetorical” (Ball & Cohen, 1999, p. 17).
These affordances of digital video are most powerful when used in a situated social context of a community of learners in which teachers collectively construct meaning through complex transactions with the multiple modes of information embedded in the video to solve the real problems presented in the video event (Greeno, 2003; Kress, 2010; Lave, 2004; Vygotsky, 1978; Wenger, 2001; Wolfe & Flewitt, 2010). Through these complex transactions between viewers and the multimodal information sources in digital video, peers provide modeling and scaffolding for thinking about and constructing meaning for teaching events, thus optimizing teachers’ individual growth within their zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978). Further, these processes support teachers’ abilities to collectively construct solutions to problems situated in the video that would be difficult to solve alone (Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2001; Kinzer et al., 2006; Lave, 2004; Putnam & Borko, 2000; Vygotsky, 1978).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Aspects of Pedagogy Discussed: Pedagogical topics that teachers talked about during video discussions, including methods/materials, processing, and engagement.
Conversation Moves: Conversation actions that teachers used to engage in video discussions: asking questions, recalling information from the video, generating hypotheses, making suggestions, agreeing, and challenging one another’s ideas.
Multimodal Source of Information: Multiple modes of information provided by sources, such as audio, visual and spatial information (such as facial expressions, gestures, and verbal interactions).
Sources of Information for CPVA: Sources from which teachers draw information for CPVA, such as discussions and videos.
Collaborative Peer Video Analysis (CPVA): This includes a teacher sharing a video-clip of his/her pedagogy for a particular purpose/s, and then viewing and discussing this clip with a small group of colleagues to generate new pedagogical ideas.
Community of Learners: Group of teachers who are actively engaged in collectively constructing meaning. In our research, the broad community of learners was the group of teachers taking the practicum course together. The teachers who engaged in CPVA together also constituted a smaller subset of the community of learners.
Conversation Turn: The speech turn that a teacher takes after the preceding speaker and before the next speaker.
Digital Video: Audio/visual information captured and stored in a binary format as opposed to analog form.