Carpenter co-authors article on teacher collaboration via Instagram

Carpenter, professor of education, and his co-authors published the article in "Computers & Education."

Jeffrey Carpenter, professor of education and director of the Teaching Fellows program at Elon University, co-authored an article in the peer-reviewed journal “Computers & Education.” He worked with Eric Richter, Andre Meyer and Dirk Richter (University of Potsdam) on the open-access article, titled “Instagram as a platform for teacher collaboration and digital social support.”

The article abstract reads as follows, “Social media platforms can be sites for professional collaboration and the provision of digital social support among teachers. Instagram is one such platform that is widely used but that has received only limited attention from education researchers. To date, little is known about which teachers use Instagram for collaboration, the ways in which they collaborate, and how this collaboration contributes to their perceptions of digital social support. Using questionnaire data from 249 teachers from Germany, we identified three collaboration activities among teachers on Instagram: information seeking, information sharing, and co-creating. While teachers with higher levels of enthusiasm for teaching in particular are more likely to use Instagram to seek information, teachers with higher self-efficacy levels are more likely to share content. In addition, seeking and sharing information as well as co-creating are each positively associated with various forms of perceived digital social support. These findings point to the potential of social media use contributing to teacher professional development and indicate that it deserves more attention in both teacher education and research.”

The article citation is:

Richter, E., Carpenter, J.P., Meyer, A., & Richter, D. (2022). Instagram as a platform for teacher collaboration and digital social support. Computers & Education, 190, 104624.