Abstract
In an educational context that includes an overarching neoliberal agenda and rapidly expanding inequalities that cross social, racial, class, linguistic, and gender lines, preparing educational leaders to promote social justice in educational systems is more urgent than ever. Framed by critical posthumanism, this self-study inquiry investigates the construction of hybrid teaching practices that foster the kind of authentic interaction needed to develop transformative leaders who are capable of challenging unjust social relationships in educational institutions. In our findings, we explore the ways the introduction of technology changed the nature of teaching, how we strengthened the connections between online and in-person coursework, describe the creative possibilities afforded by technology, and outline issues of social justice that surfaced during our analysis. The study highlights the professional learning of two Educational Leadership faculty in the area of online pedagogy and speaks to the promise of self-study as a rich way for faculty to engage in collaborative, transformative learning. The study holds the potential to help faculty improve their teaching practice as well as assist them to think deeply about how their subjectivities are mediated via various technologies.
Keywords
In an educational context that includes an overarching neoliberal agenda and rapidly expanding inequalities that cross social, racial, class, linguistic, and gender lines, preparing educational leaders to promote social justice in educational systems is more urgent than ever (Bogotch and Shields, 2014). The California State University, East Bay Educational Leadership for Social Justice Educational Doctorate (EdD) program has focused on this imperative for years, but with the “intensification” of schooling (Apple, 2011) that has accompanied the corporate reform agenda in education, school leaders’ lives have become more and more demanding. To better accommodate our students, the program recently moved to a hybrid or blended format, meaning that each course offers a blend of online and face-to-face learning opportunities. In this paper, we—two EdD faculty members—discuss a self-study inquiry (Pinnegar and Hamilton, 2009) investigating our own practices as we enact hybrid pedagogies aimed at fostering critical orientations and knowledge for educational leaders to combat historical and contemporary inequalities within the schools they serve and the places where they reside.
The paper builds on an initial action research cycle completed in 2015 (Authors, 2015), which investigated student experiences in blended courses offered over one quarter. From this previous inquiry, we established a baseline of student experiences with our hybrid practices and coursework. Namely, we discovered that there were both constraining and enabling factors associated with our blended pedagogies. For instance, students reported that they struggled with course organization, which took time away from their learning. They also felt that the online learning activities were procedural and technical, leading them toward a task orientation rather than engaging them in authentic dialogs designed to broaden their understanding of leadership, social justice, and research. On the other hand, students felt that the hybrid nature of the courses allowed them to take part in the program in the first place and provided multiple entry points for those who were nontraditional students (such as English language learners) because they could engage with the material at their own pace. In the current self-study, we pick up from these responses and look to attend more closely to our own practices, and specifically, to the ways we are able to construct hybrid pedagogies that foster the kind of authentic interaction needed to develop transformative leaders who are capable of challenging unjust social relationships in educational institutions. Our study is guided by the following question: How do two Educational Leadership faculty members construct hybrid pedagogies that support the development of increasingly critical understandings for students?
Theoretical perspectives
We adopt a view of education based on the work of multiple critically oriented theorists and educators who examine the factors and conditions that contribute to historic and current inequalities and power differentials in schools and larger society (e.g. Bourdieu, 1973; Freire, 1970; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995; Weiler, 2001). Having worked in schools in the larger Bay Area, which tend to serve large proportions of marginalized student groups, leaders who enter the ELSJ program are normally aware of the massive inequalities that exist in our educational systems and larger society (Ladson-Billings, 2006). However, much work must be done with our students regarding less visible factors that may, albeit unintentionally, support schools’ reproduction of societal power imbalances (Bourdieu, 1973)—such as recognizing and interrupting the patterns of deficit thinking toward those marginalized students and understanding the larger impact of valuing a technical view of leadership rather than a moral one (Theoharis, 2007). Raising awareness of and problematizing these often deeply invisible ways of thinking about education and leadership is very difficult, as it involves changing deep-set beliefs.
A second line of thinking informing our study is critical posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013). Posthumanism is an umbrella group of philosophies and theories that offer a monistic, multiplistic, vital materialist perspective of life and activity. Although not all perspectives under the umbrella of posthumanism are concerned with issues of justice, critical posthumanism continues to make issues of power, ethics, and knowledge production central, while also offering a set of shifts that disrupt Western humanism and anthropocentrism.
Critical posthumanism is important to our work for multiple reasons. For one, the move from dualism to monism directly speaks to our social justice stance and mission. The inequalities perpetuated by systems of schooling and beyond that we seek to interrupt are grounded in the commonsense notions of humanistic rationalism, which impose white, Christian, Eurocentric, heteropatriarchal ways of thinking as universal and transcendent (i.e. simultaneously a view from everywhere and nowhere) (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013). There are many implications of this logic, but we focus here on the dualities it creates, perpetuating false divisions between self/other, nature/culture, human/animal (or human/world) and allows man (and specifically, white, Christian, Eurocentric, heterosexual man) to assign himself the ability to reason. Those who cannot reason in the acceptable fashion are the other, and it is this duality upon which current oppressions are predicated: the reasonable self who can self-govern and is normal, and the other that is not, and therefore may be—must be—subjugated, exploited, fixed, and/or erased. From a posthuman lens, we exist on a single plane of matter (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987)—all together and connected, yet also very different (Braidotti, 2017), and that difference is positive rather than punitive, because difference is what produces life and creativity.
Posthumanism is also important because it moves us out of an individualistic, anthropocentric mind-set—that the single human is the measure of all things (Braidotti, 2013). Western thinking assigns autonomy to the human subject, who has control over her material environment, and is differentiated from animals, technology, and the physical world because she has autonomy, consciousness, and the ability to reason. Posthumanism holds that humans are only one element of assemblages, or composites of human/nonhuman components (e.g. teacher–students–desks–classroom–subject matter) that have distributed agency across both human and material elements (including technology). This type of thinking is important not just for developing critical leaders who can see themselves as parts of connected organizational systems that collectively work to produce a more just educational system and society, but also because it recognizes the agency and importance of analyzing the technologically mediated material world and our connections and interactions with it. For the present project, and the future of our program, we recognize that we are hybrid. Ours is not a person-centered program—rather, we are a human–technology configuration.
Literature review
In the current neoliberal context of higher education, universities have faced state budget cuts and rising costs. As they have turned their attention to efforts that will maximize faculty time and student tuition dollars (Porfilio and Yu, 2006), online programs have proliferated across the nation (Schneider and Smith, 2014). While such programs may be attractive to universities for multiple reasons, e-learning research over the past two decades has yielded mixed results on the effectiveness of such models (e.g. Means et al., 2013). As an example, Cavanaugh (2001) and Machtmes and Asher (2000), two meta-analyses of studies comparing the outcomes of online and face-to-face instruction in higher education, found that there were no significant differences between the two learning formats. Other studies have pointed to the criticality of the pedagogy used, rather than the format itself. For example, features of instruction such as student–student and student–teacher interaction (Zhao et al., 2005) and collaborative group activities (Shinsky and Stevens, 2011), derived from commonly accepted notions of the social activity of teaching (Vygotsky, 1978), are more likely to define successful online teaching.
For programs that take an explicitly critical focus like ours, we also are attuned to the challenges of online instruction to support social justice-focused learning experiences (e.g. Caruthers and Friend, 2014; Schneider and Smith, 2014; Wang and Torrisi-Steele, 2015). In particular, online instruction may perpetuate isolated, individualistic learning patterns antithetical to the dialogic interactions needed to problematize commonsense thinking, pedagogies, and power relations (Baran et al., 2011, 2013). Yet, recent research suggests that it is possible to enact a critical pedagogy in online instruction (Wang and Torrisi-Steele, 2015). Within this slim body of literature, researchers argue that, if teachers purposefully use technology as a tool for dialectic interaction (Schneider and Smith, 2014), online pedagogies can become “a form of political intervention entangled in a broader project of transformation and social justice” (Caruthers and Friend, 2014: 15). Promising practices include critically framing discussions and self-reflective writing (Wang and Torrisi-Steele, 2015), digital storytelling (Guajardo et al., 2011), and coproduced texts (Caruthers and Friend, 2014).
Methods of inquiry
The project we report on in this paper is a self-study (Pinnegar and Hamilton, 2009) aimed at studying and improving faculty’s critical hybrid practices in a social justice-focused EdD program. In determining an appropriate methodology, we adhered to LaBoskey’s (2004) criteria for self-study of teacher education practices: namely, that the project is initiated by us (the faculty members), is focused on improvement of pedagogical practice, relies on qualitative methods, seeks trustworthiness through detailed examples, and is taken up for transformative goals. While our context is not specifically teacher education, we follow other researchers (e.g. Pithouse-Morgan and Samaras, 2014) who have taken up self-study in other practice fields. We view this methodology as consistent with that of the initial action research project the current paper builds upon, as it is not only a tool of professional development but also a way we can enact a “practical philosophy” (Carr, 2006) in which theories/concepts are put to work for transformative purposes. In this case, those theories include social constructivist learning (Vygotsky, 1978), critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), and critical posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013).
However, self-study does diverge from action research in some respects—unlike action research, the focus is not necessarily on the action, but on the practitioners conducting the study, the experiences of those practitioner(s), and their personal/professional improvement. As Samara and Freese (2009) note, “Self-study builds on the personal processes of reflection and inquiry, and takes these processes and makes them open to public critique” (5). While the self certainly plays a central role in self-study, from a posthuman perspective, the focus of inquiry is an expanded relational self (Braidotti, 2013) that includes not just the body–mind of the practitioner but also the contexts, discourses, material elements, and technologies that mediate her. For us, that means we must locate ourselves bodily, geopolitically, and theoretically. As previously noted, we are both faculty in an Educational Leadership doctoral program with an emphasis on social justice. Both of us come from working class backgrounds. Author A, a White woman, grew up in the deep south and Author B, a White man, was raised in the northern United States close to the border with Canada. Although we are both grounded in critical theory, Author A is influenced additionally by neomaterialist theories (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) nomadic feminist thought (Braidotti, 1994, 2013). Due to our location in the Bay Area, a generally progressive area of the country, and the social justice focus of our university as a whole, we enjoy the freedom to create curriculum and teach from explicitly political perspectives.
Data sources and analysis
During our second round of inquiry (building on the first action research cycle), we engaged in ongoing reflective dialogs as faculty regarding our practices (Pinnegar and Hamilton, 2009), with one of us taking notes regarding our key points of discussion. We conducted two focus groups (Barbour, 2013) with our current students to discuss their experiences with the hybrid coursework and wrote reflections on the transcribed student responses from these focus groups. Notably, we do not include the actual focus group transcripts in our data analysis, but only our own reflections on them. In addition to this data, we also generated a series of narratives that responded to a set of prompts we created. These included the following: (1) Describe your orientation toward using a hybrid approach in a doctoral program focused on social justice. (2) Describe some of your most effective activities/practices for fostering social justice orientations and how the hybrid format of the program shapes those (or what role hybrid instruction plays in those). (3) How has your teaching changed in the past year or two? What specifically has changed and why? (4) How have students responded to your hybrid instruction? Give examples. (5) What are some specific challenges around hybrid instruction that you are still dealing with? How will you address them?
We relied on constructivist grounded theory methods (Charmaz, 2006), as well as continuing conversations, to produce the “findings” we present in the following section (consistent with our theoretical perspective, these are not “found” in the data but are rather constructed from our analysis). After familiarizing ourselves with our data set, which as noted above, encompassed our notes from our dialogs, our reflections on student focus group transcripts, and our journaling, we each engaged in round of initial inductive coding (Saldana, 2015). We brought our initial emerging ideas together in another series of dialogs to synthesize and refine our analysis, as conversation is just as important a process in analysis as it is in the entire self-study process (Pinnegar and Hamilton, 2017). From these analytic dialogs, we identified key lessons to report, which would also inform specific actions we would take to change our practice to better enact pedagogies that help students develop knowledge and skills to tackle significant social justice issues in their settings. The translation of findings into concrete action is an essential facet of self-study, and indeed, one of its unique strengths. As Loughran (2004) reminds us, “In teaching generally, and in teacher education particularly, there has been a long history of research that has had little influence on practice” (241). While we also seek to generate lessons that may be applied for pedagogical practice more broadly, our practices have been immediately impacted by our inquiry.
Findings
In the sections below, we present a series of lessons learned. Alongside discussions of our analysis and illustrative accompanying examples, we also present our current pedagogical thinking, informed by posthuman concepts, such as assemblage and hybridization. We first explore the ways the introduction of technology changes the nature of teaching, followed by a discussion regarding strengthening the connections between online and in-person coursework. We then describe the creative possibilities afforded by technology, as well as issues of social justice that surfaced during our analysis.
Producing different types of pedagogy
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) note, A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature. (250)
As an example, Author B often relies on the online discussion board feature to facilitate open-ended conversations about various social justice issues. In the focus groups we conducted, students who took Author B’s summer course felt that he was missing in action in the digital conversations, in contrast to his more active role in the face-to-face dialogs they enjoyed in class. Because they did not hear from him in response to their posts, they worried that their contributions to the class’s collective virtual conversation were not right and desired “feedback” from the instructor to validate their replies. In contrast, in class, Author B was present in his embodied form, and if not contributing to the conversation as a central participant, was interacting by guiding the conversation and giving students nonverbal cues that they might interpret as validation. Interestingly, Author B was, in fact, “present” in these online forums and read all of their responses with avid interest. He was merely doing his best to transfer his classroom pedagogy into an online form. As was his habit in the classroom, he aimed to serve as a facilitator for the conversations rather than an active participant, guiding the conversation but preferring that students take center stage building on and pushing each other’s thinking. He resisted the idea of offering feedback on students’ answers in the discussion board because he was concerned that if provided feedback on whether students’ answers were right or not, he would be occupying a position as the “expert” authority imposing his own views, a position that conflicted with his beliefs, rooted in Freirean critical pedagogy. In our conversations discussing the students’ views of Author B’s role in the discussion board, we came to the agreement that Author B needed to be “seen” in some way online in the discussion boards so students could register his presence and active participation in monitoring the conversation. He decided to do so through posing critical questions rather than responding in ways that imposed his own views. Further, we agreed that he should make his pedagogical intentions explicit in his syllabus and bring it to the attention of students so he is transparent with his reasoning and students do not feel “abandoned” by him when they move into online conversations.
Recognizing that face-to-face and hybrid instruction produce different types of teaching and learning, we also began to strategically leverage face-to-face and hybrid sessions to ensure that students have space for the embodied experiences that accompany grappling with difficult and sometimes uncomfortable issues of social justice. For instance, Author A teaches an applied research sequence where she requires students to keep a reflexive research journal as they collect and analyze data for a pilot project. This project helps students analyze the complex assemblage of factors—personal, historical, sociocultural, political-institutional, methodological, contextual, theoretical, and practical—that shape the study that is conducted, the data that is collected, the knowledge that is constructed/produced from that data, and the impact that knowledge has on the world/society. In keeping the journals, students use different prompts to interrogate their own positionalities regarding these multiple dimensions and consider how these shape the decisions they make in terms of what to study and how to study it, and how those decisions in turn, as well as their own role in the study, shapes their meaning-making. Author A planned the Applied Research course to delve into reflexivity and critical examinations in the first three face-to-face sessions of her course. As this entails students dialoguing about the history of research oppression in communities of color and with subordinated populations and confronting their own deeply set ideas of quality research as objective, she integrated opportunities up front to meet face to face and engage in difficult dialog. The online classes were then planned during the time that students were engaged in data collection, with their data collection activities and journaling the main online activity. From building their understandings up front about the journal, students produced more thoughtful entries and described a more positive impact than students who had engaged in this activity during our first cycle of study.
Hybridizing our pedagogy
At first, mirroring the issues of many online instructors, our face-to-face and online components of our courses were disconnected (Bullock, 2011), another issue that surfaced in the student focus groups and our own conversations. We came to realize that the online and in-person classes needed to connect not just in terms of the content but also in terms of the overarching pedagogical and organizational structures we were using, while also taking into consideration that digital activities produce different things because the teaching changes in nature. In this way, we can move to a more complex conceptualization of a course that is truly hybrid, with the content, pedagogical methods, and tools informing each other recursively. As an illustration, Author B had noticed that his students made their voices heard and participated fully when they were together in class, but online, were more likely to hold back, decline to participate, or leave superficial responses. During the second year of teaching the course, he required them to “maintain a presence” both online and in face-to-face classes to achieve a continuity of experience. He described, Unlike when I taught 8021 last year, students are now required to maintain a presence from the start to the end of the course. By leaving a presence through various artifacts (e.g., response to readings, self-produced video stories, and posting and responding to their peers’ stories) and making themselves ‘real people’ who have grappled with injustice and oppression during their lifetime due to unjust systems, policies, and practices, the online environment has become a space where students reveal their understanding of central course concepts as well as become more comfortable to learn from one another.
Students begin the project by using their learning from their reading and class discussion to collectively create a research question to investigate from a preconstructed set of information about a “problem”: The main participants of EdD programs tend to be full-time working adults. However, on-time graduation rates at many institutions tend to be lower than that of PhD programs due to multiple factors, including increasingly heavy workloads of P-16 educators and family commitments. Little is known about how full-time working adults successfully balance multiple responsibilities to graduate in 3 years.
During the second part of the assignment, students learn how to construct basic surveys in a face-to-face class. Again using Google docs to collaborate in person, groups use the axial codes they generated to create a survey, using a checklist of criteria. They share their survey questions, again via Google docs, with another group, and receive/give feedback on the questions. Students then use Google forms to create their survey and share it with everyone in the class. During the final two class sessions, which are both online, students take each of the surveys and then, collaborating asynchronously through Google docs, they analyze the frequency of responses using a scaffolded tabulation sheet, and generate initial thoughts on what the frequency of response to the questions show. They then craft a reflection on the discussion board about the quantitative part of the project. For the final report, students watch an online presentation in VoiceThread about writing up the results of the interviews and surveys and are provided a graphic organizer on Google docs to scaffold the structure of the report. Students collaboratively fill out the graphic organizer and then use it to construct a narrative report that is submitted for a final grade.
Space for creativity
In response to student experiences in the previous study, both of us began to experiment with digital tools for assignments with a social justice focus. These opened spaces of creativity not previously available to us online, and allowed us to move beyond, or at least add to, the online pedagogical staple of discussion boards and activities that privilege textual response. As an illustration, Author B developed an online assignment in which students develop critical stories of themselves, or critical autoethnographies, in which they reflect on how their race, class, gender, sexuality, class status, political identity, and so on have affected them as students, educators, and community members. Students chose from several online digital story-making tools to create and share a digital story that communicated specific conversations, experiences, and memories, instances, events and interactions that have shaped their identities and worldviews. As a second part of the assignment, students engage with each other’s stories, leaving constructive and reflective comments.
Author A took a series of workshops regarding tools for screencasting, digital stories, wikis, video manipulation, and interactive platforms like VoiceThread. The latter has been one of the more successful ways that she engages students in authentic interactions online. In the previous study (Authors, 2016), students described their online interactions as being “task oriented” and feeling forced. As Author A noted in one of her journals, I’ve received feedback that the VoiceThread activities are better opportunities to interact with texts, presentations, and other learning materials. For example, in VoiceThread activities, I’ve included a presentation with narration where students leave comments (in text, audio, or video form); or included an article that students read for homework and asked them to identify quotes that resonated with them, they connected to, expanded their knowledge, or were confused by, and to leave comments describing their reactions or questions; and then to comment on other people’s comments that they connected with. Students found this exercise meaningful; and they also liked that there were two different articles, and they could choose the one they preferred to leave comments on.
Addressing issues of social justice
As a final theme, our analysis allowed us to pinpoint issues of social justice for our students that were occurring as a result of the hybrid experience. From our survey, we identified that some of our students were experiencing difficulty with access and navigation of the learning platform and other tools that were required to be successful in the program. To address this issue, we worked with another faculty member to create a support module for a course she teaches, which is the first course students take in the program. In doing so, we can accommodate for the spectrum of ages and socioeconomic/cultural backgrounds and familiarity/comfort with various forms of technology. Students who are already familiar with the program’s technological requirements may “test out” of this module, but those who need additional assistance may attend multiple lab sessions co-led by the instructor and the program technology assistant. With this additional module, we are able to provide entry points into the online/hybrid portions of the courses, regardless of the amount of previous experience and comfort students may (or may not) have had with the digital tools required.
In addition, the focus groups and questionnaire revealed that some students were not able to access all of the online information due to disability. In particular, one student, who is Deaf, noted that in some instructors’ online classes, the entirety of the pedagogy is aimed toward hearing students. In other classes, attempts at accommodation were made, but they were not effective—for example, captions or transcripts provided to accompany videos did not match or were only partially available. From this feedback, both faculty members carefully examined their online classes to ensure that they are fully accessible to students with a range of abilities, and arranged for a faculty professional development session to address accessibility in online environments for differently abled students. This issue highlights a very important lesson not just for us but for all educational programs taking advantage of the advances of technology to create hybrid learning experiences: the increased use of technology has the potential to create new sets of barriers that could reinforce already existing inequalities.
Discussion
Technology, society, and the planet have been changing for the last several decades, but our thinking still espouses the same petrified patterns (Guattari, 2005). Put simply, this outdated type of logic is not equal to the task of living productively in an increasingly complex, technologically mediated world. For the vast majority of western society, the dominant way we define our world is dialectical or in binary, “either/or” terms. In this study, we have taken up the question of critical instructional practice that addresses two major binaries, face-to-face/online instruction and teacher/technology, and attempts to trouble the imposed boundary between them through a posthumanist shift to a monistic ontology.
From a monistic point of view, or in Braidotti’s (2013) terminology, from a perspective of “radical immanence” (56), commonsense ontological categories such as human and nonhuman (or human and machine, or human and technology) are not totally separate, but rather, exist on a continuum. From the perspective of monistic philosophy, human and technology are part of the same substance—they are just variations of it (Deleuze, 1988). This breaks down the artificially imposed boundary between in-person and online learning formats, and disrupts hierarchies that privilege human over nonhuman elements, whether they are physical (e.g. computers) or immaterial (e.g. the Internet). Rather than opposed, these elements are in a mutually interdependent relationship with each other. In other words, both humans and technology have agency, and both affect, or even produce, the other (Strom, Mills, Abrams, & Dacey, 2018). Just as we as faculty members act on and transform technology, the technology acts on and transforms us. For example, faculty interact and shape our technology by creating courses with lesson modules on our learning platforms to communicate key ideas; in turn, technology mediates our pedagogical practices—it shapes what we can do—and becomes a part of our expanded professor subjectivities (Braidotti, 2013) as we become-machine (Braidotti, 2013; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).
Shifting to a posthuman, radically immanent view of faculty–technology holds potential for troubling the resistance that working with technology can produce for faculty, which some have termed “technology anxiety” (Johnson et al., 2012; Osika et al., 2009). Rather than seeing ourselves as separate from machines and the virtual world of the Internet, studying our use of technology through a posthuman lens helps us see that, whether we like it or not, we are always already technologically mediated. Here, however, we echo Braidotti’s (2013) call for simultaneous critique and creativity, that is critical analysis combined with the generation of alternatives. We by no means suggest that we should use technology unproblematically and ignore its material reality and affects. A we noted in the last section, to do so would be to continue to reproduce inequalities, perhaps just in different ways (e.g. rendering auditory content inaccessible online for deaf students due to incomplete or incorrect captioning). Instead, we are arguing for a both/and (and, and, and…) approach, that is an approach that is constantly seeking connection and proliferation, rather than calcifying into binaries. We need to recognize that the delineation between technology and instructor is a falsely imposed boundary, and examine our uses of technology as well as those who are excluded or exploited by that use. At the same time, we also need to rather look at the ways that we as faculty come into composition with technology, and find new productive ways of doing so, rather than trying to reproduce more of the same disconnected “hybrid” pedagogies or resist them altogether.
In sum, in this self-study, we examined our own practices to assess the ways we were able to enact a socially just pedagogy that helps students develop critical leadership orientations, knowledge, and skills. By taking a posthuman lens, we reframed our teaching as assemblage, and examined how the productions of in-person and online assemblages produced different patterns of teaching and learning. We also examined ways that we strategically used online instruction, increased the actual hybridity of our practice by considering the relationships of the two formats, and experimented with different pedagogical tools to help students engage with critical ideas and each other in more authentic ways. Finally, we also noted social justice gaps in our online practices and worked to address those.
This study provides a contextualized example of practices carried out in a hybrid social justice-focused Educational Leadership doctorate program. Such detailed descriptions are critical given the recent proliferation of online instruction at the graduate level and the simultaneous need to prepare leaders to address critical equity issues in P-12 settings (Jean-Marie et al., 2009; Shields, 2015). Further, with the ubiquity of online instruction, many faculty—including those with vast pedagogical experience—find themselves in the role of novice educator once more when faced with planning and enacting online instruction. Thus, this study adds to extant literature by highlighting the professional learning of two Educational Leadership faculty in the area of online pedagogy, through a lens of social justice and posthuman theory, and speaks to the promise of self-study as a rich way for faculty to engage in collaborative, transformative learning. The study holds the potential to help faculty improve their teaching practice as well as assist them to think deeply about how their subjectivities are mediated via various technologies.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.