Exploring Pedagogies for Diverse Learners Online: Volume 25

Cover of Exploring Pedagogies for Diverse Learners Online
Subject:

Table of contents

(23 chapters)

Section I: Promises of Digital Technology for Teaching and Learning

Purpose

This chapter is the result of an interest in the professional and research literature exploring the intersection between education and digital technology. Decades of research and press have largely focused on the ways in which particular devices might be productively used in the K-12 classroom. Educational radio, educational television, the computer, and more recently the tablet have all been framed as being valuable for supporting student learning. Critics such as Neil Selwyn have argued that research in educational technology needs to focus less on supporting particular devices and more on the nature of social interactions that are mediated, constrained, and enabled by various technological affordances.

Methodology/approach

This chapter reviews four theoretical frameworks in terms of their approach the social nature of the use of technology in education.

Findings

The chapter introduces a number of conceptual frameworks that are helpful for considering the social implications of using digital technologies to support the needs of diverse learners in a teacher education classroom.

Research implications

Scholars, especially who are also teacher educators can consider using and developing frameworks that are more robust for thinking about digital learning in education.

Originality/value

The value in this chapter lies in the critical conceptions explored and interrogated. The author demonstrates the complexity of teacher knowledge overlaid with technology.

Purpose

This chapter presents findings from a qualitative study focused on the strategies that two marginalized seventh graders used as they completed an Internet inquiry project about survival.

Methodology/approach

The participants spent time over a four-week period in three phases – selecting a topic, locating information, and presenting information. Participants completed journals and participated in interviews. The participants’ online searches and how they organized their presentations were recorded. The researcher took field notes. These four data sources were used to determine subcategories in each phase to document the strategies they employed as they completed the project.

Findings

Participants used phrases and questions as they decided on key words to locate information. The majority of the sites they visited ended in the .com domain. They used different web browsers and spent varied amounts of time reading websites once they decided on key words and selected sites. Each participant approached the project uniquely and met the requirements to complete it.

Research implications

This study suggests that students in self-contained resource classes engage with online content in sophisticated ways but that they still need support from teachers to optimize their learning.

Originality/value

Studies like this add to a body of research offering thick descriptions of teachers and students work together. In addition, this chapter derives value from the fact that it was conducted by a classroom teacher and therefore offers a unique perspective on the classroom as a learning environment as well as a site of inquiry.

Purpose

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the Occupational Course of Study (OCS) program through blended learning courses offered through the North Carolina Virtual Public School. In this program, students take classes online with a virtual content area teacher and meet in a face-to-face setting with a certified special education teacher.

Methodology/approach

This chapter offers a practical exploration of the OCS program. Its intention is to offer insight into the perspectives of virtual teachers and face-to-face teachers and provide an understanding of how this type of blended learning has the potential to deliver high quality academic coursework targeted to meet individual learning needs.

Findings

This blended environment format is a viable method for helping highly qualified content area teachers and teachers with disabilities work together to meet the individual learning needs of students with disabilities.

Research implications

The OCS program is able to support large numbers of students who need transition services. Evaluation on this program reveals that collaboration between various educational professionals supports learning outcomes for students.

Originality/value

Many K12 districts offer alternative diplomas for students with exceptionalities, with a goal of preparing students for their transition to postsecondary employment and independent living. This chapter offers a practical description of this program for the benefit of other systems that may want to consider this model.

Section II: Reimagining Support for Online Learners

Purpose

The purpose of this chapter is to overview what extant research says about parental involvement in online learning environments.

Methodology/approach

The approach in this chapter is a systematic review of literature focusing on engagement frameworks.

Findings

Parents have the potential to be the key to overcoming key concerns about attrition and achievement in online settings. However, research has been silent as to how to engage parents more fully as learning coaches for their children.

Research implications

Research about parental involvement in online learning should consider the roles of both teacher and parent as they coordinate their efforts to improve student engagement. Research also needs to look at what parents need to know about helping their students be successful and how to provide the training and expertise to parents that will help them learn critical support skills.

Originality/value

This chapter is particularly timely in light of the dramatic growth in online learning and the resulting concerns about achievement and attrition that are particularly acute among at-risk populations.

Purpose

This chapter attends to the fact that research has revealed much about the importance of parents in this process, especially their increased instructional roles when their children undertake online courses. However, little is known about how online curriculum vendors construct the parents of their potential enrollees in order to make online learning an appealing option.

Approach

This research examined what these testimonials revealed about how such companies conceptualize the beliefs parents of potential students. Inductive narrative theme analysis was used to analyze the testimonials.

Findings

The findings of this research revealed a characterization of parents as providers of access to online learning, organizers of schedules around online learning, and leveraging time working online as space to nurture and support their children’s academic development. The major plotline of these testimonials is one where parents solve problems for their children, who are not being successful in school, which resolves anxiety about a child’s previous school performance and their future as students. For the parents, the benefit to this enrollment is increased feelings of efficacy.

Research implications

This research comments on the role of narrative in educational decision-making in general and has additional potential to inform online teacher work with parents.

Value

The value in this chapter lies in the author’s unique approach to inquiry. Very little research on online learning has looked critically at what vendors promise in online learning.

Purpose

This chapter presents data from research studies specifically aimed at gathering the perspectives of K-12 students who are taking online courses for credit recovery, their virtual school teachers, and face-to-face school support professionals.

Approach

This research employed ethnographic techniques to explore the benefits and challenges of online learning as a strategy for credit recovery.

Findings

Our research explores several key findings. The data suggest that the benefits and challenges of online learning for students are one in the same. With proper orientation, individualized support, and purposeful structuring of online programs, online and blended learning as a potential solution for credit recovery students, potentially decreasing the number of future high school dropouts.

Implications

This chapter suggests a need to look more carefully at orientation, support, and structuring procedures for online credit recovery.

Value

This chapter is very valuable as a tool for thinking about credit recovery online. It also provides valuable insight into credit recovery from the perspectives of students who are doing the online courses.

Section III: Thinking about Online Practice

Purpose

Ecosophy focuses on the broad and deep connections we all share; the relationships within, among, and between social processes, economies, ideologies, materialities, and living systems.

Methodology/approach

In order to bring ecosophical issues to the fore, I draw on a pedagogy of the glocal: a pedagogy informed by an awareness of, and aiming to create an awareness of, the ways that global trajectories intersect with local practices.

Findings

I analyze my own experiences using glocality as a pedagogy in several online courses for graduate students. As part of these courses, we worked toward an awareness and activism informed by both glocal understandings and ecosophic commitments.

Research implications

This research offers new ways to think about the commitments that are necessary for online learning in teacher education to move forward. Specifically that ecosophy can be applied to a variety of new problems in teacher education.

Originality/value

This chapter’s unique approach models thinking with theory in online education. It also offers a valuable underused way to integrate technology and pedagogy through shared commitments.

Purpose

As teacher education moves online, there is an increasing need for teacher educators who subscribe to relational stances that attend to and enact liberating pedagogies with preservice teachers preparing to teach and inservice teachers who come to online courses for professional development.

Approach

This chapter explores common frameworks for interactive relational models of teaching from John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, and Paulo Friere and then proposes, using examples from the author’s practice, how these models translate into online contexts.

Findings

Diversity in education calls for increased awareness of individuals using a relational stance. This stance should apply both to schoolchildren as well as the teacher candidates and teachers in development that are coming to teacher education to build and improve their practice.

Research implications

More research on relationality in online learning is necessary. This research should take shape through using theories that are complex enough to provide insights that marry the pedagogical with the relational aspects of teaching as part of a comprehensive teacher education experience.

Value

This chapter makes a valuable contribution to research in teaching online through its thorough inquiry into theories of learning and teaching and they apply – or do not – online.

Purpose

Happiness in teaching, termed Eudemonia, comes from a perception of a relationship with students. Such a perception is vital to sustaining teachers in their work in both on- and offline contexts. While the importance of these relationships has been acknowledged, there have not been attempts to account for how teachers pursue relationships and the accompanying sense of happiness. It is in this frame that we discuss findings from a larger study of online teachers working to support students with disabilities in a part-time program at a large virtual school.

Methodology/approach

The chapter considers expectations for online teachers and sets up a dialogue between same and different as they relate to on- and offline pedagogy. It then asks more questions about these responsibilities in the context of efforts by teachers to feel legitimate in their claims to relationships with students.

Findings

Stories that both elicited and threatened Eudemonia are shared and discussed. In particular, the authors learned that online teachers desired relationships with students to such a great extent that they were willing to narrate relationality into most interactions with the students.

Research implications

These findings suggest the difficult emotional work that online teachers must do in order to consider their work with students as beneficial. More work is needed to think about how relationships between teachers and students online can be leveraged for greater learning and to sustain both teachers and students in their work.

Originality/value

This chapter offers in-depth insight into the teacher work that online learning requires. It also offers a unique theoretical approach in the juxtaposition of stories of relationships with students online and offline.

Cover of Exploring Pedagogies for Diverse Learners Online
DOI
10.1108/S1479-3687201525
Publication date
2015-10-07
Book series
Advances in Research on Teaching
Editor
Series copyright holder
Emerald Publishing Limited
ISBN
978-1-78441-672-0
eISBN
978-1-78441-671-3
Book series ISSN
1479-3687