Building Professional Capital: Teachers information literacy practices using Twitter

Abstract

Teachers' professional development has long been a focus of study for educational researchers. Social media provides teachers with new ways of connecting with others in order to discuss their professional practice and development. This is often at the informal end of the professional development opportunities that teachers experience. This study is conducted against a growing background of literature on social media use by teachers. The aim of this study is to investigate how and why teachers use the social media platform Twitter to both discuss their practice of teaching, but also how they develop information literacy practices around their use of the affordances of Twitter. Set in the wider context of practice theory, this study looks at both the learning and practices involved using Twitter as a medium. Using Nahapiet and Ghoshal's model of social capital to explain how the construction of a network of individuals builds social capital between those individuals, increasing opportunities for exchange and combination of information emerge through teachers' use of Twitter, helping them create new intellectual capital. Using the sociocultural theory of information literacy practice developed by AnneMaree Lloyd, the study explores how the digital affordances of Twitter and other affordances are used to enact information literacy practices across the platform and beyond. The study explores the challenges and opportunities for the development of teacher's professional practice and their reasons for using Twitter. Four teachers, two based in England, one in Scotland and one in the Northwest United States were recruited. A case study methodology was chosen, with qualitative methods that collected data over time. Social media data was collected along with interview data over a period of 5 months. Content and thematic analysis was undertaken to identify the key themes relating to the research questions. Participants are enacting information literacy practice. The importance of the profile in making judgements about the construction of the social capital as well as in the judgement of credibility of information is explored. The role of the digital affordances in managing high levels of information flow is seen, in addition to the role played by those affordances in the storage and extraction of the information found is also discussed. This study explores how and why teachers use the digital affordances available to them to manage the flow of information, store and extract it to build professional capital. The use of Twitter by teachers to increase their social capital when they are in schools with low social capital is identified. This study contributes to what is known about the information literacy practices of teachers, particularly within the context of the use of digital affordances available in social media such as Twitter.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Carlo Raffo (Supervisor) & Drew Whitworth (Supervisor)