Last August I saw a poster about the Digital Tattoo Project and had a look at the website. The project looks at issues around digital presence and identity; our “digital footprint”. I bookmarked the site and kind of forgot about it until last month when I was thinking of ideas for my EDUC500 paper. I went back to the site and read From Student to Teacher: Becoming a Professional. It was this article that got me interested in the topic of teacher professionalism and social media.
The article relates the author’s experience as a teacher candidate and her concern with the “limits and restrictions on my off-duty conduct, including how, when, and where I interacted digitally”. It goes on to describe her preparation of case studies and resources for teacher candidates to help them consider the challenging “intersection of digital identity and professionalism”. It also makes mention of a 1996 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that is interpreted by the BC Ministry of Education to mean that “educators are held to a higher standard than other citizens”. It was this quote that gave me pause for thought and engaged me with the topic.
Since then, through links on the Digital Tattoo Project website, I found a Searchable Discipline Database on the BC Ministry of Education website. This is a database of Discipline Outcomes against teachers by the former BC College of Teachers and the current overseeing body (the Teacher Regulation Branch of the B.C. government Ministry of Education). Here I searched for discipline outcomes related specifically to “inappropriate use of social media”. There are 57 of these dating between Jan 2003 and Jan 2018 (with one outlier from Jan 1996). From looking through some of these I was fascinated by what these teachers were found to have done, who they did it to, how/when they did it, and what the consequences of these actions were. Last week I met with Emily Fornwald, the author of the article that sparked my interest, and picked her brain about her project and got some ideas about how I might frame my research in relation to this and, specifically, with use of the discipline outcome database.
My idea for my paper for EDUC500 centers around the issue of teacher professionalism and social media. I want to examine the discipline outcomes in detail and look at the data there and break it down into categories. I have not yet established these as I feel that I could better do this as I go through the data; I am not predicting or theorizing anything at this stage. After and while I work through the data, I hope to be able to provide some general explanations of how teachers in BC are being held accountable for their misuse of social media and what the consequences of this are. This could be of use to practicing teachers, and teachers in training, so they might be more aware of the “higher standard” they are being held to with regard to teacher professionalism and social media.
The article relates the author’s experience as a teacher candidate and her concern with the “limits and restrictions on my off-duty conduct, including how, when, and where I interacted digitally”. It goes on to describe her preparation of case studies and resources for teacher candidates to help them consider the challenging “intersection of digital identity and professionalism”. It also makes mention of a 1996 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that is interpreted by the BC Ministry of Education to mean that “educators are held to a higher standard than other citizens”. It was this quote that gave me pause for thought and engaged me with the topic.
Since then, through links on the Digital Tattoo Project website, I found a Searchable Discipline Database on the BC Ministry of Education website. This is a database of Discipline Outcomes against teachers by the former BC College of Teachers and the current overseeing body (the Teacher Regulation Branch of the B.C. government Ministry of Education). Here I searched for discipline outcomes related specifically to “inappropriate use of social media”. There are 57 of these dating between Jan 2003 and Jan 2018 (with one outlier from Jan 1996). From looking through some of these I was fascinated by what these teachers were found to have done, who they did it to, how/when they did it, and what the consequences of these actions were. Last week I met with Emily Fornwald, the author of the article that sparked my interest, and picked her brain about her project and got some ideas about how I might frame my research in relation to this and, specifically, with use of the discipline outcome database.
My idea for my paper for EDUC500 centers around the issue of teacher professionalism and social media. I want to examine the discipline outcomes in detail and look at the data there and break it down into categories. I have not yet established these as I feel that I could better do this as I go through the data; I am not predicting or theorizing anything at this stage. After and while I work through the data, I hope to be able to provide some general explanations of how teachers in BC are being held accountable for their misuse of social media and what the consequences of this are. This could be of use to practicing teachers, and teachers in training, so they might be more aware of the “higher standard” they are being held to with regard to teacher professionalism and social media.
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