The School of Critical Studies and Education invites you to a presentation by Jack Webster as part of his Provisional Year Confirmation.
9-11am Tuesday 31st October | 6EN-313, Epsom Campus
Secondary school teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand are encouraged to integrate digital citizenship into their teaching practice and to nurture students to become discerning, responsible digital citizens. As a concept, digital citizenship education (DCE) is understood in a variety of ways that seek to engage with issues that individuals face in a digital world. However, a unified vision of what DCE entails does not exist within the literature. Furthermore, little is known about teachers’ understandings of digital citizenship, how they are engaging with DCE and the casual mechanisms, across wider society and in their local context, that shape their perceptions of DCE.
This research aims to explore secondary school teachers’ perceptions of DCE and the factors that shape how DCE is perceived. Framed in a critical realist paradigm, the research uses interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine the phenomenon of DCE at the empirical level, through teachers’ descriptions, and at structural levels, by examining the mechanisms or structures that influence teachers’ perceptions of DCE. The research uses postdigital theory to examine the challenges digital citizens face, and to examine participants’ responses by exploring ways in which the digital is or is not problematised in their perceptions.
This research is informed by my profile as both a researcher and a teacher. My time as a teacher was spent negotiating broad, often vague, education initiatives and trying to enact them in the classroom. As a teacher, I was also aware of the complex socio-cultural and socio-technical environment that generated sometimes explicit, but more often than not implicit, expectations and assumptions for teachers to adhere. This research looks to unpack these influences on teachers’ perceptions of digital citizenship. The study aims to position teaching experiences at the heart of developing DCE in line with the challenges of participating in post-truth societies characterised by scepticism of expertise, invasive digital technologies and big data surveillance.
Jack is a doctoral student at the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Education and Social Work. Originally from the UK, Jack spent 7 years in Shanghai where he taught History and Theory of Knowledge. He holds an MA in Development Education and Global Learning from University College London. In his MA thesis, Jack investigated the efficacy of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme to equip students with the competencies to succeed in a 21st century society. He also has a BA (Hons) in History from the University of Derby. Jack’s research interests are citizenship education in the digital age and how postdigital theory can be used to examine education’s response to the pervasive influence of digital technologies, spaces and narratives on learners and teachers.
Jack is supervised by Carol Mutch, Jennifer Tatebe and Kerry Lee.
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