Helen DeWaard Defends PhD Dissertation

Dr. Helen DeWaard (Contract Lecturer, teaching Critical Digital Literacy courses in the Faculty of Education) has successfully defended her PhD dissertation, Media and digital literacies in Canadian teacher educators' open educational practices: A post-intentional phenomenology. Helen was supervised by Dr. Michael Hoechsmann.

Helen explains that her research “delved into the lived experiences of fourteen teacher educators from across Canada in their endeavours to infuse media and digital literacies into their open educational practices. Through the use of a post-intentional phenomenological framework and methodology, with a crystallization approach to data analysis, the research revealed the complex navigations teacher educators make to support student learning with open web resources for communication, creative production, collaboration, and criticality. Using a navigational gyroscope as a metaphor, the research suggests that teacher educators stabilized their view of the horizon while locating a view of the end goal for themselves and their students, and grounded themselves in order to provide foundations for student learning, as they navigated the multiple, complex, contextual, and rapidly moving elements swirled around them.”

Helen produced her dissertation in two formats, reflecting her open educational practice as a researcher and a scholar. Her dissertation can be accessed as a public document created with Scalar software that was shared “live” as it was being written, and as a PDF manuscript archived in the university library.

Congratulations, Helen!