Hybrid spaces - teaching meets social media.

For the last few years a colleague and I have run an innovative project in our undergraduate teacher education program, called eTutor. The idea behind the project was to establish a secure online environment where pre-service teachers could 'tutor' school students from overseas countries in English through online conversations. In 2013, with the assistance of a Seed Grant from the Office of Learning and Teaching we extended the project to include students from Australian schools as well. This year over 250 pre-service teachers are currently Online engaging more than 600 primary and secondary students from six countries in online conversations in the secure, private eTutor environment. Students from India, Malaysia, Taiwan, Nepal and China interact in eTutor with pre-service teachers and students from three schools in Melbourne, Australia.

  

Pre-service teachers encourage small groups of participating school students to post comments and blogs or participate in online chats about a range of topics. Students write about their interests in their profiles, or respond to questions and small tasks set by the pre-service teachers, using correct English language. Topics might relate to Games We Play, Things We Celebrate, Foods We Eat, or other topics that promote an exchange of cultural information. Students also post images and videos that form the basis of conversations.  So far, soccer (aka football) is the most popular topic of conversation! Seems like it truly is the global sport. The topic of conversation is not the focus, however - the intent is to simply engage the school students in writing, in English, working on the assumption that practice makes perfect!

 

If you are interested in learning more about eTutor, you can visit the companion website at edmedia.rmit.edu.etutor.

It was hoped that through such close, personal encounters with students from different cultures, that pre-service teachers would develop their intercultural competence, that is their ability to communicate effectively and with empathy with people from different cultures. In a world of growing diasporas and globalisation, teachers in Australia, and elsewhere, are facing increased cultural diversity in the classroom. Standards for graduating teachers recognise the need for teachers to be able to teach students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (AITSL). However, my pre-service teachers don't always have opportunities to develop their awareness of the role cultural and linguistic diversity can play in a classroom and how they need to take an inclusive approach in their classrooms. eTutor was designed to give them an opportunity to practice strategies of inclusivity, and of engaging culturally diverse students. It was also designed, through sharing information about their own and others' cultures, to open them to cultural self examination, to interrogate those often black-boxed cultural assumptions that shape who we are as teachers. In a Frierian sense, we were offering opportunities to change pre-service teachers' ways of thinking, feeling and behaving in an action oriented approach - rather than simply offer abstract knowledge about intercultural competence we created an authentic space where intercultural competence could be practiced.

Another aim of the project was to fuse pre-service teachers' growing knowledge and skill in teaching (engaging students through questioning skills, giving feedback, developing stimulating learning activities in ways that are inclusive and supportive) with their well developed social media and digital literacy skills. In one sense, eTutor was designed as a 'third space' - a hybrid space that grew out of the connections between the domains of the physical classroom with which pre-service teachers were becoming increasingly familiar, and the online spaces of social media, with which pre-service teachers were most comfortable. eTutor constituted an entirely new space for learning and teaching, one that was in many ways fundamentally different from either individual domain. Within this new or third space, pre-service teachers crossed the boundaries between their customary roles that existed in the physical classroom, where the notion of how teachers behave was clearly defined and understood, and their roles in social media, where again the role as communicator was clearly to them.

In theory, it should be a match made in heaven. However, what is most interesting is how many of the pre-service teachers found this new space difficult to negotiate. For example, whilst built to mirror much of the same functionality of social media (posts, image sharing, video sharing, chat) it didn't look exactly like mainstream social media tools. A minority percentage of pre-service teachers found it difficult to locate where within the site the students had posted their blogs or messages, claiming 'it's not like Facebook' even though they had access to a user guide, and the site provided notifications that mirrored those in Facebook. Despite my pre-service teachers being high users of social media (even during my classes!) it seems that eTutor did not feature as highly on their priorities. When away from the physical classroom setting, remembering to check eTutor for new conversations and posts was challenging for some pre-service teachers. I try to draw parallels to a face to face setting by explaining that the lack of attention to the online students was akin to ignoring the students in the classroom. I ask them to think how their students would feel if their teacher didn't communicate with them for two weeks. The penny drops and my pre-service teachers feel terrible for ignoring their online students. 'But Nicky, they don't seem real' is a common rejoinder.

One pre-service teacher also explained that checking social media is like a quick break for their brain - it doesn't take much time or much concentration. Whereas in eTutor, it is more than just skimming the latest posts. As tutors they need more time to consider how they might respond to the students' posts, or what online task they might create to engage the students in further writing.

Pre-service teachers also find it challenging to create the same type of 'classroom culture' online that emerges out of the spontaneous interactions that characterise the physical classroom. Nothing much in eTutor is spontaneous, other than the real time Chat which is serendipitous and ephemeral, but requires careful crafting and consistent attention. Conversations can take some weeks to run their course, as students are not always online frequently.

What is emerging from the eTutor project is consistent with Bhabha's warning that a third space cannot be directed by old principles, but that new ways of interacting in this space need to emerge and evolve. eTutor, like any third space is neither easy nor quick, but is a continual construction, which may never be fully achieved (Klein et al., 2013).


Further reading about Third Space theory:

Bhabha, H. K. (1994) The location of culture. London: Routledge.

Klein, E. J., Taylor, M., Onore, C., Strom, K. & Abrams, L. (2013). Finding a third space in teacher education: creating an urban teacher residency, Teaching Education. DOI: 10.1080/10476210.2012.711305.

Rutherford, J. (1990) The third space: An interview with Homi Bhabha. In J. Rutherford (Ed.) Identity: Community, culture, difference (pp. 207-221). London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Zeichner, K. (2010). Rethinking connections between campus course and field experiences in college- and university-based teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 61, 89-99.