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).