Search

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to re-center playfulness as a humanizing approach in teacher education. As teachers navigate the current moment of heightened control, surveillance, and systemic inequity, these proposed moves in teacher education can be transgressive. Rather than play as relegated to childhood or infancy, what does it look like to continue to be "playful" in teaching and teacher education? Design/methodology/approach: To examine how teacher educators may design for teachers' critical playful literacies, the authors offer three "worked examples" (Gee, 2009) of preservice teachers' playful practices in an English literacies teacher education course. Findings: The authors highlight instructional design elements pertinent to co-designing for teachers' play and playful literacies in teacher education: generative constraints to practice everyday ingenuity, figuring it out to foster teacher agency and debriefs to interrupt the teaching's perpetual performance. Originality/value: The term "playful," as a descriptor of practice and qualifier of activity appears frequently in educational literature across domains. The relationship of play to critical literacies--and, more specifically, educators' literacies and learning--is less frequently explored.

During the past three years, as we abruptly moved to remote everything--remote learning, remote teaching--many of us felt the increasing distance from our students. As folks battled COVID-19 and navigated [...]

This article provides a comparative case study of two connected learning experiences in teacher education that vary in scope, participants, time, and design to consider the questions: (1) What characterizes humanizing engagement across varied experiences of connected learning in teacher education? and (2) What repertoires of practice become shared through discourses of collegiality in educators' connected learning experiences? Back-tracing from educators' written reflections to their digitally networked activity in Twitter chats, processual case analysis involved rounds of inductive coding and exploratory data visualization. We identified repertoires of practice across three continua of preservice and inservice educators' practices--sharing, care, and experimentation--which together characterize a range of more and less humanizing discourses of collegiality. Participants in both cases reflected on experiences across the spectrum of each continua, highlighting the limits of these connected learning designs in fostering humanizing learning experience in teacher education. We provide implications for teacher educators regarding fostering more critical and reflexive humanizing connected learning in teacher education as well as for the design of such experiences.

Rapidly developing technological advances have raised new questions about what makes us uniquely human. As data and generative AI become more powerful, what does it mean to learn, teach, create, make meaning, and express ourselves, even as machines are trained to take care of these tasks for us? With youth, and in the context of literacy and media education, we embrace this moment to broaden our social imaginations. Our collaboration with journalists ages 14–25 from 2019 to 2023 has yielded a corpus of over 30 multimodal compositions constructed with and/or about AI reaching audiences in the millions. On the basis of these youth texts – produced within our participatory research at YR Media, a national STEAM learning center and platform for emerging BIPOC content creators – we developed the conceptual framework presented here: Humanizing Data Expression (HDE). The key role of expression in HDE distinguishes the human from the machine through the lens of storytelling. Analysis of this corpus (podcasts, web‐based interactives, videos, radio features, online posts, social media assets) revealed four literacy practices of YR Media authors as they made sense of AI: (1) contextualize: try out AI‐powered features, reveal how it works; (2) unveil authorship: introduce AI creators and processes; (3) grapple: explore tensions and paradoxes; (4) play: hack, mess with, outsmart, exaggerate AI. From these insights, we end with implications of HDE as a framework for learning and teaching AI literacy, including its potential for critically transforming data literacy practice and pedagogy across schools, teaching, and teacher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]