What Practical Relevance Can Tell Us about Teacher Reflections on Experiences Expressed through Digital Storytelling
Abstract: This paper presents the results of a study conducted at a university in the western United States, which compared practical relevance of reflection upon learning experiences expressed through digital stories and journals. Practical relevance encompasses the idea that as teachers think more deeply about topically relevant matters, their reflections on experiences can be deemed more relevant to their practice. Participants were graduate-level practicing or soon-to-be practicing teachers who attended a space-science education conference as a group. Numerical measures of practical relevance were generated from reflection narratives of digital stories and companion journals. In this study, practical relevance values inferred from digital stories met or exceeded those inferred from journals for 76% of participants (n=34). These results suggest that digital storytelling can be a viable means for reflection on experience for twenty-first century teachers and can provide insights into which experiences teachers view as contributing most to their practice.
Presider: Raluca Sirbu, AT&T CTO