Identity Artifacts: Resources that facilitate transforming participation in blended learning communities

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2022.100846Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Learning from participationist perspectives involves transforming identities.

  • Artifacts-of-identity are often overlooked public resources about students in courses.

  • Artifacts-of-identity can be intentionally designed for and used to support learning.

  • Online tools can be used to create rich pools of identity artifacts.

  • Students' identities in communities can transform when supported properly.

Abstract

This study builds on views of identity as jointly accomplished stories about people expressed through interpersonal relations as they participate in learning communities. Specifically, we suggest a framework that introduces the notion of identity artifacts – Shared resources in the public sphere about participants' lives. We analyzed a blended, humanistic learning community in a graduate setting that included specially designed person-centered activities to facilitate closer interpersonal relationships. We found 2640 identity artifacts, collected from 14 participants, which were organized into a five-staged framework. We use these to describe the role the artifacts played in the transforming participation of the students in the community. We include an extended example of a student to elucidate how this process occurs. This research advances our understanding of the connection between people's interpersonal relations and their learning practices, and suggests an approach to online pedagogies in higher education that can foster robust learning communities

Introduction

Higher education can deeply affect students' lives, spurring socialization for particular fields of work in ways that is often highly consequential for their lifelong career trajectories (Weidman & DeAngelo, 2020). The use of the internet is particularly poignant due to the growth of fully online education (Allen, Seaman, Poulin, & Straut, 2016) as well as online tools in hybrid or blended learning (Pelletier et al., 2021). This research seeks to show how a perspective rooted in humanistic psychology that is aided by the use of the internet can inform efforts to transform higher education students' identities. This perspective can guide higher education instructors seeking to create meaningful and transformative learning experiences for their students (Kasworm & Bowles, 2012). Broad or holistic approaches that view learning as transforming participation in communities of practice (Herrenkohl & Mertl, 2010; Sfard, 1998) – and thus a matter of identity (Lave & Wenger, 1991) – has been at the cutting edge of educational theory and practice (Hod & Teasley, 2021; Nasir, Lee, Pea, & McKinney de Royston, 2021).

This research connects to a vibrant, ongoing conversation on the internet and higher education about identity and how to design learning environments or online tools to support students' growth. Interest on identity has been long-standing in this field (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2010) and cuts across numerous projects and studies. One of the key questions that concerns issues of identity in online learning has to do with how social presence – the ability of people to share themselves authentically (Gunawardena, 1995) – can be maintained or supported despite the loss of many visual or sensory cues compared with what is found in face-to-face interactions (Lowenthal & Dennen, 2017). Numerous studies in recent years have sought to elucidate different aspects of this issue. For example, Garcia and Yao (2019) examined ways that doctoral students shifted their identities as part of their socialization process when they took part in a first year seminar that was designed as an online community, highlighting the vital role that instructors play in fostering a sense of connectedness among the students. Waycott, Thompson, Sheard, and Clerehan (2017) investigated how higher education students use social media to, among other things, negotiate their identities by making themselves visible (or invisible) to one another within their respective learning communities.

Bringing in a humanistic perspective to this conversation is important because humanistic psychological ideas such as active or empathic listening and prizing others' differences have become so mainstream that they are often taken as obvious or given, particularly in liberal popular culture and in educational research (Rogers, 1961/1995). Contemporary educational researchers and psychologists altogether know relatively little about the field, and often rely on negative stereotypes such as that the field is unscientific (Elkins, 2009; Taylor & Martin, 2001). Still, there is a robust academic community (Cooper, O'Hara, Schmid, & Bohart, 2013; Cornelius-White, Lux, & Motschnig-Pitrk, 2013) with existing conceptual frameworks and a wide set of practices that have grown directly out of humanistic psychology that explicitly rely on these ideas (Yalom & Leszcz, 2020), yet have not been foregrounded nor expounded deeply enough in research on the internet and higher education. Our claim in this article is that these ideas are powerful and relevant; we aim to show how they work as well as how they can enrich research in the field today.

Section snippets

Fostering growth in students' identities

In this section, we draw on a conceptual framework rooted in humanistic psychology called the social microcosm theory (Yalom & Leszcz, 2020). This theory serves as a widely accepted foundation for group psychotherapies, which aim to foster growth of participants' identities. To tie this into ongoing research on identities in higher education, we introduce the notion of identity artifacts as community resources that are essential to the way historical and distant experiences play a part in

Methods

We designed and investigated a HLC to investigate our research questions, enacted in a blended (face-to-face and online) setting. The norms and practices that HLCs aim to foster are based on the intended cultures of two communities. The idea-centered culture aligns with knowledge building communities, as described by Scardamalia and Bereiter (2014). This ideal culture includes students taking epistemic agency, continually advancing and deepening ideas, taking collective cognitive

Findings

The following sections provide answers to our research questions. Section 4.1 focuses on the first research question; the two subsequent sections focus on the second. Section 4.2 reports on the identity artifacts and themes found among all 14 students. Section 4.3. provides an in-depth case study centered around one course participant to illustrate how identity artifacts shaped the student's changing identity and participation. Although we analyzed all cases, we chose to tell Andrea's story

Discussion

This research sought to elucidate the way identity artifacts are resources that shape higher education students' participation in humanistically-oriented blended learning communities. We drew on Rogerian ideas as a starting point to elaborate on the process of learning, defined by a person's transforming participation (Rogoff, 1994; Sfard, 1998), and conceptualized them in a way so they are consistent with contemporary notions of identity as being jointly constructed stories about people (Hand

Conclusions

This study opens the doors to future research that can advance the conversation on identity in higher education. Specifically, one area that we did not touch on was how students' transforming identities directly related to their content related achievements. While this connection is suggested, for example one would assume that learning how to become more reflective and focused (as in the case of Andrea) would translate positively to her content-based accomplishments, this is a question that

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