Studies have found that effective teacher professional training should focus on developing teachers’ content area knowledge, pedagogical skills, as well as collaborative working capabilities (Desimone, 2009). Pre-service and beginning teachers often struggle to form their professional identities. For instance, they experience difficulty in acting as a teacher versus feeling like a student, and they also feel inadequate in knowledge while being expected to act like an expert (Pillen et al., 2013). A big challenge in teacher education is to provide student teachers effective means, resources, and opportunities to help them develop their new identity as a professional (Misra, 2018). Promoting student teachers’ professional identity is even more challenging when they are learning in a distance setting. This study addresses this issue by exploring how adopting OER-enabled pedagogy (Wiley & Hilton, 2018) in an online course helped pre-service literacy teachers to form their professional identities. Specifically, we examine how student teachers’ professional identities were developed through their process of collaboratively creating an openly licensed literacy methods book.
Data sources include the book created by the students as well as their weekly blog postings throughout a semester in 2021. Textual analysis (Frey et al., 1999) was adopted to analyze the content, structure, tone, and visual design of the student-created OER. The findings suggest that the student teachers drew on various resources (e.g., academic literature, personal experiences, professional language) to establish and express professional identities in their open licensing book. They not only reflected on their learning experiences but also created new knowledge (DeRosa & Robinson, 2017). The collaborative open book project thus allowed the students to apply their content-area knowledge, practice their pedagogical strategies, and actively adopt a new professional identity and took on an “expert” role, despite the challenges of learning in a distance setting during the pandemic. We also provide some practical suggestions for teacher educators interested in using open pedagogy assignments in their classes.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Understand the challenges of developing teacher professional identities in an online setting
- Describe how creating open licensing content can help student teachers form their professional identities
- Learn how student teachers express their professional identities in their self-created OER
