Envisioning a sociocultural digital reading curriculum : exploring teachers' collaborative professional learning online

This dissertation study examines the experiences of five middle school English language arts teachers as they engaged in inquiry-based, online professional learning (PL) over the course of one semester. Their purpose in this PL was to develop understandings of online reading and to create curricular materials about online reading for their middle school English language arts classes. The participants came to this project with experience teaching English and literacy from a sociocultural, workshop-based tradition, and the expectation at the outset of the PL was that teachers would draw both from their own pedagogical knowledge as well as from new knowledge gained during the PL as they designed curriculum. The PL was collaboratively designed by the researcher and the team’s instructional coach; within the original design, participants were afforded a great deal of flexibility in determining the direction of their learning within the parameters of the shared topic and goals, and opportunities to facilitate PL activities themselves. Findings focus on (a) how participants learned during the semester, (b) the ideas about online reading they developed, and (c) the curricular approach and materials they constructed.