Teachers Turning to Teachers: Teacherpreneurial Behaviors in Social Media
Item
Title
Teachers Turning to Teachers: Teacherpreneurial Behaviors in Social Media
Abstract/Description
There is growing evidence that educators engage in social media and virtual social networks across formal and informal settings to direct the trajectory of their curriculum. Interactions within and across virtual spaces provide opportunities to flatten hierarchical structures as teachers may directly or indirectly engage with educational decision making and reform implementation (e.g., Supovitz et al. 2015). This article examines an educational phenomenon, the emergence of a teacherpreneurial guild—that is, a teacher collective promoting professional practices, norms, and entrepreneurial activity—creating and defining knowledge underlying educational practices and classroom behaviors. Using a sample of Midwestern elementary teachers, this work identifies patterns of online educational resource access over 4 years across 135,000 pins shared within Pinterest, a social media platform. Results indicate teachers most often turn to one another for resources and professional materials. This may have implications for trust developed within teacherpreneurial guilds and teachers’ ability to exert agency within their profession.
Author/creator
Date
In publication
Volume
127
Issue
1
Pages
49-76
Resource type
Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form
Published Text
Scholarship genre
Empirical
Open access/full-text available
No
Peer reviewed
Yes
ISSN
0195-6744
DOI
Citation
Torphy, K. T., Hu, S., Liu, Y., & Chen, Z. (2020). Teachers Turning to Teachers: Teacherpreneurial Behaviors in Social Media. American Journal of Education, 127(1), 49–76. https://doi.org/10.1086/711012
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