Chapter+1_Introduction

Cultivating a Personal Learning Network that Leads to Professional Change

The purpose of this research is to explore how educators in higher education interpret personal interactions and related material use as they contribute to one's open and ongoing professional learning (i.e.,changes to one's understandings and behavior). The participants include English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) educators working at three different universities in Mexico. EFL is defined as English being taught within a location where English is not the dominate language (e.g.,learners studying English who interact in a predominately Spanish-speaking community or country). In contrast, English-as-a-second language (ESL) is defined as English being taught within a location where English is the dominate language (e.g.,learners studying English who interact within a predominately English-speaking community or country). For the purpose of this discussion, the term EFL will be used since this is the context from which there search is based,but that many concepts will also apply to ESL contexts as they pertain to professional learning.

Currently, professional development tends to focus on practices and programs instead of people; that is, building professional learning around practices and programs tends to result from isolated workshops, change initiatives that fail to create a conducive learning environment, and summative teacher evaluations that simply recapitulate past events with little-to-no ongoing support (Reeves, 2010). Thus, further research is needed in order to better understand the distributed nature of learning, specifically the role of materiality in the workplace (e.g., professional web tools) and the basic assumptions of what constitutes professional learning (Fenwick, 2009; Fenwick, 2010). Understanding how and why educators interact with people and objects changes the discussion of specific ends a priori (e.g., a school mission statement and vision statement) to a preliminary discussion of means and ways from a individual's perspective (e.g., sociotechnical preferences within spatial and temporal dimensions). The results of this study will contribute to the scant research to-date regarding how facilitative discussions permit open and diverse discourse through the development of means, ways, and ends (Zhang, Lundeberg, & Eberhardt, 2011). The authors conducted a discourse analysis based on grounded theory that focused on problem-based learning in professional development. The results showed that facilitative discussions emerged from 6% coming from the facilitators themselves while 94% came from the in-service science teachers taking the PD course, and that facilitative discussions are more prevalent when teachers are asked open questions based on prior discussions that relate to prior experiences.

Chapter 1 establishes scholarly research related to the purpose of this study. The problem statement is introduced followed by the rationale for conducting such a study. A qualitative case study, research questions will be presented that specifically parallel the problem and the purpose for pursuing said research.