What Would Yoda Do?

What Would Yoda Do?

A Jedi Approach to Professional Development

A recent ‘call for submissions’ by the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, prompted three of us interested in the influence of ‘the digital’ on curriculum and pedagogy to convene a meeting and discuss how we might contribute to this conversation. Individually, we work in our own contexts (schools, school districts and university settings) to navigate the amorphous digital culture in ways that allow us to integrate emerging technologies into our classrooms and our professional lives in purposeful ways.

We decided that in many ways, a ‘call for submissions’ was really the academic version of crowdsourcing amongst a community of scholars. With that in mind, we have elected to further crowdsource the ‘call’ in the form of a question posed to our broader community of educational colleagues, thereby leveraging our various social media networks in ways that embody cultural participation and co-creation. As such, all participants will be viewed not as ‘subjects’ of a study but as co-authors of the resulting product.

A framework has been developed in order to focus the contributions around the status of professional development in education. In keeping with the spirit of ‘embodied practice’, we aim to create a slideshare presentation by remixing the content provided by participants. Embracing the participatory culture afforded through networked communication, we are starting with the simple question: What Would Yoda Do?

To this end, we invited members of our collective social networks to participate:

Step 1: Review images shared by Stephan through Creative Commons on Flikr called Stormtroopers 365

Step 2: Consider a caption, comment, quote, or personal words of wisdom for one or more of the photographs that reflects:

· Current ‘pet peeves’ you have with current professional development experiences;

· Possibilities for re-imagining professional development that is socially and intellectually engaging.

Step 3: Tweet your caption, comment, quote, or personal words of wisdom on the topic of ‘professional development’ using the hashtag #wwyd

Step 4: Tweet a link to the image (from the Stormtroopers 365 photoset) that you’d like us to use in referencing your tweet. Be sure to include the hashtag #wwyd

We were thrilled with the responses of our communities, and have posted the results of what we learned here to share with all. We learned a great deal from engaging in a collaborative writing process that leveraged ‘new media’ that is increasingly a part of our professional lives. It has provided us with a great deal of information to inform our ongoing thinking about ways in which we engage our students in participatory work with Web 2.0 tools. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed to the ‘call’.

What Would Yoda Do? A Jedi Approach to Professional Development