Abstract:
Online platforms are dynamic venues for K-12 teachers to explore identity, agency and engage with professional learning and development. However, the vast amounts of teachers’ online narratives and discussions about their work can be overwhelming to laypeople, researchers, and policymakers alike to make sense of and identify emerging trends and issues. Yet this corpus of online data offers insights into lived experience about, for and of the profession.
A set of research practices known as netnography (a methodology to undertake an ethnography on the internet) offers a powerful way to explore teachers’ work and their ruminations in local to global contexts. Pioneered in the mid-1990s, netnography has increasingly been harnessed by education scholars since 2013. Such scholars have explored issues spanning early education, K-12 schooling, self-learning, adult learning, remote learning, doctoral students’ loneliness, high-school mathematics teaching, graduate students, and learning English as a foreign language, among many others.
This scoping review style literature review follows scoping review principles (JBI and PRISMA-ScR frameworks). The review has curated and mapped netnographies from scholarly literature and grey literature. This research question drives the review:
· What research gaps exist in using netnography to explore K-12 teacher agency and identity work on social media?
Further questions:
· How have netnographers collected, analysed and synthesised data from social media platforms to explore K-12 teacher agency and identity work?
· How do K-12 teachers utilise social media to express, negotiate, or challenge their professional agency and identity?
· What are the key research gaps in understanding the relationship between social media use and teacher agency/identity work that netnography can address?
The literature review’s objectives include:
· How netnographers have delved into teachers’ use of social media for agency and professional identity.
· Methodology details: Researchers’ roles, research purpose, research paradigm, data collection domain, content types included, and analysis approach.
· Prominent researchers, their contributions and stated research gaps, as well as silences this researcher identifies.
· Ethical considerations that netnographic researchers have stated.
Moreover, the review distills insights from 19 netnographies to help identify research gaps that could guide further exploration and inform policy and practice. While a solo PhD project limits this presentation to only a literature review, it may broaden the appeal of netnography (which comprises a prescriptive yet flexible set of 25 research practices) within the education research community.