Field Experience Reflections: Bret Willet Staudt Presentation

         For those of you who have been following this blog, then you know that I mentioned in my last post that I had been procrastinating writing my reflection because the words didn’t seem to want to leave my head. Well, that has also been the case for my field experience reflections—again, apologies to my professor!—I’m sure it seems worse in my head than it really is, but try reasoning with my brain. Nevertheless, here I am, trying my darndest to get something coherent onto virtual paper. I thank you, mysterious reader, in advance for patiently bearing with me.

EDIT AS OF 12/2/2020: I have now added a more updated website for Bret Willet Staudt, and if you don't want to scroll down to get it then you can click on his name in this sentence. :)

            Due to the pandemic, I have not been able to complete any in person and/or synchronous observation hours. ^[1] In place of that, my professor has kindly allowed me, and anyone else in the class, to use the presentations of various guests as field experience. While I could write a more traditional paper that reflects on all of my hours, I decided to create a series of blog posts that correspond, generally, to an hour of observation. The exception to this is that I will be making one post to cover all of the three webinars published by Birdbrain Technology on YouTube that I will be watching. The purpose of this series of posts is to reflect on my field experience by taking the concepts I learned about in the presentations and then thinking about how I might apply them to my own teaching. Given that I am a pre-service teacher who still has a semester yet before I student teach (or two if you count the summer), my musings will be theoretical in nature and might seem too idealistic for any veteran teachers reading this, although I will strive to realistic as possible in my expectations. Alright, now that that little introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the reflecting portion of tonight’s entertainment.

Our first visiting presenter was a doctoral candidate, Bret Staudt Willet, who researches how teachers use and participate in social networks. The article that we read to prepare for his visit specifically focused on educator use of Twitter, although we later learned that he has now moved onto researching the educator use of Reddit. The first half of his presentation went into detail on the patterns/trends his research uncovered on how educators used social media. While those details are not directly applicable to my future teaching, it showed me how and where to find resources I might need in the future whether that’s literal resources I can use in lesson planning or a human resource like other, more experienced, teachers. Furthermore, when I researched educational subreddits for the following class project, I found a couple of helpful subreddits that I can access for a similar purpose. I mention this mostly because I’m not sure that I would have checked Reddit out if I had not heard about Staudt Willet’s experience with, and research into, Reddit. ^[2]

            The second half of his presentation was spent discussing some of the frameworks behind research into learning communities—both those found informally online as well as those found within every teacher’s (virtual and physical) classroom. Our discussion primarily focused on affinity spaces, communities of practice, professional learning networks, and learning ecologies. I know that this part of the discussion enabled me to take a different view on participation and what exactly makes a classroom into a community, but for the life of me I cannot seem to write it down. I have been trying to write this section of the reflection for the past four-ish hours so I have officially decided to put aside my desire for pretty good writing and insights and settle for decent versions of said things:

When I start teaching, I personally believe that we will still need to have hybrid forms of public education—for better or worse—which means that I have to think about not only how I want my in person classroom to run, but how I want my virtual one to run as well. Gee’s idea of affinity spaces can begin to help with that (as well as ideas from Jon Dron’s presentation which I will discuss in a later post) because the way he conceptualizes the online learning environment inherently engages students both socially and academically without pressuring them to fit into a rigid one-size fits all structure. Moreover, affinity spaces are inherently differentiated and fluid because they allow for multiple entrances into the content, multiple ways to generate ideas and/or interact with others and place the student in control of their learning. I feel like I’m not being specific enough here about how I would use affinity spaces myself, and I guess I’m just trying to say that if I need to create an online course and I use the idea of affinity spaces I think that students are more likely to be engaged, motivated, and most importantly, to learn something.

Communities of Practice and Learning Ecologies (I have no idea if those need to be capitalized, but I’m going to assume they are until shown otherwise) I think can also help me in creating a classroom community because the former acknowledges that sometimes communities are built through shared experience and/or belief while the latter acknowledges that every community has its own interrelating components that are required for equilibrium. To further explain that last bit, if we assume that communities work thanks to each and every member of that community then that emphasizes how each student contributes to the learning of the entire class and thus, a class cannot have a learning community if even one of its students is not a member. If I use that concept when structuring activities in my future classroom, then I can potentially have more success at making sure everyone feels valued. Similarly, if I focused more on communities of practice in my future teaching, then I could have students work collectively to complete a project, which would emphasize the need for everyone’s contribution while also forging bonds through shared experience. I mean, granted, it would have to be well executed because I have certainly gone through my fair share of group projects where that was not the result haha.

Regardless, I like having these new frameworks under my belt, because, like Staudt-Willet said: frameworks are like streetlights that highlight some things and leave others in the dark. In this way, the more streetlights I have the more area I can light up—yeah I’m definitely losing this metaphor hah, I’m trying to say that since a framework is just one way to view the situation, the more that I have, the more likely it is that I can choose the best option for any given situation.

As always, thanks for wading through that until the end!

 

 ^[1] Well, I did have a tutoring job for a short while, but I had to leave due to personal reasons. Since the mother never got back to me about providing an electronic signature to verify that I was there, I couldn’t use that for field hours.

 ^[2] You can read about my forays into educational subreddits here.