IN-PERSON: Applying Education

Abstract

Exploratory research examined teachers’ use of social media as a dispositional tool during the early, transitional weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic (March 11, 2020 to April 15, 2020 timeframe). A blend of phenomenology, content analysis, and historical inquiry was used to identify and examine a set of Twitter hashtags associated with emergency online teaching. These hashtags served as the case for the study. Results of previous research (Ray & Ntuli, 2022) resulted in the grouping of tweets based on whether they belonged to the knowledge, skill, or dispositional domain. This presentation will examine the largest theme identified, the dispositional domain, along with its sub-themes. The theme and its sub-themes will be visualized allowing for both explanation and exploration of the data. Anonymous examples of tweets demonstrating alignment with the dispositional theme and its sub-themes will be shared as well. Discussion and conclusions will be of interest to teachers, administrators, and other educational stakeholders interested in teacher dispositions and pandemic impacts on those dispositions. The presentation also will be useful for instructional technologists, policy makers, and others interested in learning more about these issues, including whether and to what extent teachers’ dispositional use of Twitter reflected the evolving situation in schools during the early pandemic era.