English Teachers' Online Participation as Professional Development: A Narrative Study

Sarah, a high school English teacher in the midwestern United States, is a blogger. Writing primarily about young adult literature on her blog Y.A. Love (http://yaloveblog.com), Sarah posts reviews of books she and students in her classroom have read, previews of forthcoming releases, interviews students have conducted with published authors, and details about her efforts to promote reading among adolescents. For example, addressing fellow English teachers, Sarah wrote a blog post offering insights into her practice of reading aloud to high school students:I tried my first read aloud while student teaching. I had a few sophomore English classes, so I decided on Shattering Glass by Gail Giles. It's an edgy book, and there's some bad language and mature situations, but it's an excellent pick for reluctant readers. I was nervous about reading this during student teaching, but I went ahead and did it anyway. I had a rationale prepared and everything. My students loved it and often asked me to read "just one more chapter." Since then I'm much more comfortable reading books where characters swear, but I make sure to choose books that aren't over the top in that category. It sometimes shocks my students to hear me read those parts, but we have a conversation about why that language is in the book and how we won't be using that language in class.As Sarah continued the blog post, she explained the qualities she looks for in a read-aloud (e.g., amount of dialogue, short chapters, entertainment value). She then highlighted the read-alouds students in her classroom have enjoyed most, including Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, Boy21 by Matthew Quick, and Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins, and addressed why the books were so well received. As depicted in the excerpt above, Sarah often draws from her own experiences as an English teacher-sharing struggles and successes, offering ideas and inspiration-when blogging about pedagogical issues.Sarah also microblogs via Twitter, an online platform that limits each post or tweet to 140 characters. After blogging about reading aloud to high school students, Sarah wrote the following tweet to broadcast the post's corresponding URL: "Every day at the beginning of class I read a book aloud to my students. These are my faves http://t.co/cvIoypRs." Not addressed to anyone specifically, Sarah's tweet drew responses from multiple teachers. The following excerpt captures a synchronous Twitter exchange between Sarah and a respondent identified with the pseudonym "Humanities Teacher" and the corresponding "@humanitiesteacher" Twitter handle, also a pseudonym:HUmANiTiES TEAcHEr: @[Sarah] . . . Sarah, I used to do RAs and now they just ignore me and read their own books, even on World ReadAloudDay! Thoughts?SArAH: @humanitiesteacher . . . I've noticed some of my kids doing the same thing. I usually let it slide b/c they may not enjoy the book I read.SArAH: @humanitiesteacher . . . You could always try the "book parking lot" idea during your read aloud . . .HUmANiTiES TEAcHEr: @[Sarah] . . . So do you still have time for independent reading in-class every day?SArAH: @humanitiesteacher . . . Not every day :( We have SSR Mon/ Weds/Fri but I sometimes squeeze time in every day.Through this interactive online episode and dozens of others that were collected as one phase of a larger study, we became familiar with Sarah and four other English teachers who were engaging in what we identify as teachers' professionally oriented participation online. This participation includes not only creating new content on the Web to explore issues at the heart of teachers' professional work (i.e., teaching, learning, and literacy) but also engaging in active dialogue with professional peers about matters related to education.The teachers we followed, like Sarah, created content by leveraging the affordances of online technologies to create multimodal texts that consisted of videos, images, alphabetic text, and so on. …