Social media in pedagogical context a st

Social Media in Pedagogical Context: A Study on a Finnish & a Greek Teacher’s Metaphors Marianna Vivitsou* Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki, Finland Kirsi Tirri Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki, Finland Heikki Kynäslahti Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki, Finland ABSTRACT This study discusses the meanings underlying a Finnish and a Greek language teacher’s pedagogical integration of social media As the research spans across the physical and the virtual pedagogical meeting, our review of the literature is also based on a two-level approach The first level links metaphor with the pedagogical thinking, being the set of values and purposes underlying teachers’ decisions The second examines the meanings of the digital deriving from arguments that seek to explain the relationship between pedagogy and technology In this study we view metaphors as research vehicles and apply content analysis to draw upon the Finnish and the Greek language teacher’s speech and make their meanings visible To this end, we analyze and discuss findings of data resulting from two semistructured interviews The patterns arising from the discussion of digitally enhanced learning experiences indicate that metaphors can be shared, reflecting overlaps in notional categories (e.g., sociality and action) More powerful metaphors relate to context-dependent situations These powerful metaphors emerge when issues characterizing the local school culture are tackled in the teachers’ talk Keywords: Social media, pedagogical integration, teachers, metaphor, teachers’ speech INTRODUCTION In the educational domain, the ability to network permits a shift in perspective when social media environments are integrated into the teaching-studying-learning (TSL) process According to Uljens (1997, p 250), the TSL process is the organic relation between teachers' and students' intentional, contextual activity Sharing knowledge on the network-based milieu requires that the individuals enter a process of ongoing change and development Therefore, the continuous interaction between and among individuals, and with digital artifacts can influence teachers’ understanding of aspects of their work: the ways teachers plan pedagogical action; how they act; how they reflect upon that activity; and how they work and make decisions jointly with colleagues and students     The dynamics of the integration of social networking tools for pedagogical purposes mobilizes the social aspect of teacher personality and transforms professional identity To track these changes researchers need to shift towards analytical tools based upon a socially grounded approach to cognition (Barsalou, 2008) This encourages an expansion in theorizing connections between the mind and discourse activity In this way, research centered upon analytical tools, such as the practical argument (e.g., Vesterinen et al., 2010) that unveils the underlying reasoning of action- and moral-related decision-making of teachers, can be expanded Research targeting teachers’ pedagogical thinking (e.g., Kansanen et al., 2000) has been an asset for the development of Finland’s secondary educational system Insights from such endeavors have resulted in a deeper understanding of practices and the design of teacher education and training programs aiming to sustain professional growth In order to enhance these dynamic developmental processes, however, research in teacher education needs to be enriched with approaches that broaden the domain perspective In this article, we apply metaphor and content analysis to the dataset resulting from the semi-structured interviews of a Finnish and a Greek language teacher We so in order to draw upon the teachers’ discourse activity (Cameron et al., 2010b) Through the analysis of the teachers’ speech, we aim to identify and interpret the metaphors underlying the integration of social networking technologies for pedagogical purposes Considering the patterns that arise during the analysis process, we group the metaphors in semantic categories Overall, these reflect shared and context-dependent metaphors The study spans across both the physical space of the pedagogical meeting (i.e., where students’ and teachers’ intentions meet), and the virtual space of the digital learning experience In other words, the teachers’ speech, being the expression of their pedagogical thinking, focuses on situations where learning activities in the conventional classroom environment blend with learning activities performed in social networking environments Within this framework, the teachers’ metaphors as ‘extensions of meaning’ (Ricoeur, 1976) emerge According to the Ricoeurian theory (Ricoeur, 1976, p 50), metaphorical interpretation requires a kind of stretch, a transformation of the literal in order to make sense To further clarify the conceptual bases of our research, below we discuss the relevant literature in relation to the aims and purposes of the study TEACHERS’ METAPHORS IN CONTEXT Metaphor in the Pedagogical Being in a process of continuous decision-making (Kynäslahti et al., 2006, p 252), teachers integrate digital environments to enhance teaching, studying and learning Pedagogical decisions are based upon the teacher’s own personal belief system and reflect the intuitive and the rational bases upon which the individual structures a decision, justifies and warrants that decision The intuitive basis refers to the individual’s own experiences and may be founded on personal needs or tradition The rational basis includes principles, research     findings, scholarly contributions, and examined practices It may quite easily be broadened into a more detailed structure in which there is interaction between the bases and where the reasons given consist of common elements from both Justification and argumentation for pedagogical decisions is called the teachers’ pedagogical thinking (Kansanen et al., 2000; Kynäslahti et al., 2006) Teachers’ pedagogical thinking is intertwined with the internalization of the values and goals of the curriculum that determine teacher purposiveness In turn, pedagogical thinking shapes and is shaped by the pedagogical meeting The pedagogical meeting is the space where teachers’ and students’ intentions, activities and reflections meet (Uljens, 1997, p 75) When information and communication technologies facilitate the TSL process, the conventional scenery changes As the ways of communication change a new ecology in the school culture emerges Along with the new ecology, a new relationship between human beings and their environment is shaped If the aim is to gain an insight into this new culture underlying the social media integration, an understanding of teachers’ values as expressed in the teachers’ own discourses is needed As Polkinghorne (1983) states, values provide the meaning of individual events on the one hand On the other hand, values and educational goals are the pillars on which purposeful teaching is built Therefore, they should be examined in unison In Finland the goals of education are established in the National Curriculum (2003) For a meaningful TSL process, both teachers and students should be aware and agree on the goals and aims of education (2003) The values of the teaching profession that should guide all the interaction between teachers and their students, the parents and their colleagues are expressed in the Ethical Codes (Code of Ethics for Finnish Teachers, 1998) The Finnish guidelines for teachers’ professional ethics identify four values: human worth, justice, honesty, and freedom These official documents provide the platform for teachers to reflect upon educational goals, values and meanings, and, thus, to develop professionally In Greece the values and purposes of teaching are defined through the National Curricula for Lower and Upper Secondary Education The National Curricula are issued by the Ministry of Education and the Pedagogical Institute, and apply to secondary schools all over the country The core values of the educational process are defined as the values of democracy, of respect for human rights, of peace, and freedom (2003) These serve as the vehicles that will shape teachers’ purposes in order to, ultimately, “enable pupils to function as informed, responsible and active citizens in continuously changing and highly demanding social settings” (ibid) A ‘purpose’ can be defined as a stable, long-term goal that contributes to the world beyond the self while it is also meaningful to the self (Damon, 2008; Damon et al., 2003) One can identify two kinds of goals: one that has as its primary intent the benefit of the world beyond oneself (a purpose); and one that has as its primary intent the benefit of the self (a selforiented life goal) A purposeful life, thus, requires understanding of life’s purposes, planning, and future orientation Teachers need a sense of purpose to find their work     meaningful and also to be able to foster purposefulness in their students Meaning is what emerges when the content is enacted in a classroom based on the methodological decisions of a teacher In this process the individual growth of a student is fostered According to Hopmann (2007, p 115), “The purpose of teaching and schooling is in this perspective neither to transport knowledge from society to a learner (curriculum), nor a transpositioning of knowledge from science or other domains to the classroom, but rather the use of knowledge as a transformative tool of unfolding the learner’s individuality and sociability ” Recent empirical findings show that both practicing teachers and student-teachers in Finland emphasize some general purposes in teaching regardless of the subject matter taught They all view themselves as responsible professionals whose task is to teach the students the basic knowledge of their subject matter Furthermore, they view themselves as responsible for the holistic education of the students, including their personal and ethical growth The practicing teachers seem to place a stronger emphasis on the students than the studentteachers whose main concern is still their own mastery of subject matter and the educational responsibility involved in teaching (Tirri, 2012; 2011) In the context of media education, the purposes of a teacher can be regarded from two perspectives First, it is a teacher’s duty to help a student in the study process as effectively as possible If the teacher considers that the use of media and information and communication technologies (ICTs) will support a student’s efforts to learn certain content or acquire a skill, it is, more or less, the teacher’s responsibility to integrate media and ICTs into the classroom procedure Second, media is also content Curricula in different countries vary concerning media education and media as content of learning in schools It is a teacher’s task then to follow the curriculum containing media education in the integrated mode (e.g., as part of cross-curricular themes), as a separate subject, or both Therefore, the question of purposes is twofold in the media educational terrain In their study on teachers’ reasoning with regard to media educational situations, Vesterinen et al (2010) claim that research on teaching is often characterized by the presentation of overly simplified truths about teacher actions and their willingness to involve in different types of external act or, in other words, teachers’ agency Moreover, the authors advocate that research on teaching should broaden the understanding of teaching in order to take account of the complexity of circumstances This insight is based upon the multifaceted nature of teacher thinking, which, as the authors put it, is the most striking finding in their study In this respect, while subject knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and moral issues are present, media education is also related to school and overall educational policy In addition, the consideration of comparative research findings (Simola, 2005) indicating that educational reform has not eradicated the application of traditional methodologies in Finnish schools grounds our belief that a deeper mining of teachers’ thoughts and attitudes is essential An examination into teachers’ metaphorical language can assist towards gaining an understanding of how they interpret the integration of social networking sites for pedagogical     purposes Departing from the Aristotelian view of metaphor as ‘something that happens to the noun’, Ricoeur (1978, pp 15-17) extends the definition by applying the notion of epiphora (i.e., movement) to the term ‘metaphor’ This extension denotes a semantically-focused process inclusive of all meaningful linguistic entities (i.e., verbs, pronouns, prepositions etc.), thus transcending the limits of the noun This transcendence allows for metaphor to appear by encompassing multiple phenomena (Cameron 2010, p 7) In this sense, linguistic metaphors in speech become a tool to extract socio-cultural conventions teachers are tied with or reject Ultimately, then, the overall goal of this study is the interpretation of the patterns arising from the integration of the digital into the classroom practice To arrive at this destination, we analyze metaphorical manifestations in social-media-related teacher discourse In this way, we will come to draw conclusions in response to our main research question: ‘In what ways teachers integrate social networking sites and digital tools for pedagogical purposes?’ Metaphor in the Digital What will, then, the best metaphors for digital technologies and social media be? Prevalent metaphors in the literature derive from arguments with utopian and dystopian meanings These seek to explain socio-cultural or educational change by offering distinct approaches and viewpoints Hand and Sandywell (2002) describe three opposing pairs of claims about information technology Like Janus, each has both a utopian and a dystopian face The first claim examines the worldwide web as an autonomous formation with ‘in-built’ democratic properties (or dispositions); the latter can, at the same time, be intrinsically dedemocratizing In the second claim, Information technologies not only lend themselves to democratizing global forces of information creation, transfer and dissemination; but to antidemocratic control as well, when questions of hardware and software ownership arise The third claim considers the contradictory task of cyber-politics This is to maximize public access to hardware and software thought to exhaustively define the technology in question on the one hand; to resist and pervert the anti-democratic effects of the technology in question on the other A different approach to Internet is described in Dahlberg’s (2004) scheme of three orientations According to these, technology is shaped and takes meaning from the ways individuals and groups choose to use it (uses determination) Technology ‘produces new realities’, new ways of communicating, perceiving, learning and living, although with unanticipated effects (technological determination) According to the third orientation, technology is determined by the political and economic structures of society (social determination) Dahlberg (2004) argues that none of these perspectives can stand independently None, on its own, is enough to explain everything that needs to be explained about the Internet While each is useful, all depends on the questions we need to answer As a result, different approaches may be necessary     Transferring the discussion to our premises, we could just as well argue that the ‘uses determination’ approach is kin to the educational mantra: ‘Pedagogy should lead technology’ However, a closer look at Hand and Sandywell’s (2002), and Dahlberg’s (2004) analyses are telling in terms of overlaps and mismatches On the one hand, both approaches pose neutrality as a key quality of technology On the other hand, the questions about ownership and control zero the equation At the same time, both arguments explain change in primarily technological terms Thus, technology is not a just ‘tool’ -it actually drives the human element to social and educational change, not the other way around Eventually, both arguments are technologically deterministic Technology, therefore, is neither neutral nor determining It is, however, contextually bound and this is how it should be investigated (Feernberg, 2010) Another lens to interpret the role of technology in pedagogy and education is through the analysis of metaphor in speech In their seminal work, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) found that pervasiveness of metaphor exceeds the domain of language It actually expands into thought and action Thus, the concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect They also govern each and every mundane detail of everyday functioning: what we perceive, how we get around in the world, how we relate to other people In this sense, not only does our conceptual system play a central role in defining our everyday realities; it is also overwhelmingly metaphorical (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) Communication is based on the same system we use in thinking and acting Therefore, language is one source of evidence for what those concepts are like when transposed in metaphors To make their meanings more concrete, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) use the concept ARGUMENT and the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR as examples The metaphor has a strong presence in everyday language as is made obvious through a variety of expressions, e.g., in ‘indefensible claims’, ‘attacked weak points in argumentation’, ‘targeted criticisms’, etc Following a similar conceptual pattern, Johnston (2009) identifies two broad categories of metaphors in her review of editorials about the Internet One takes a utopian perspective with transformative and revolutionary metaphors of salvation; the other is dystopian with attacking and supplanting metaphors of destruction Reflecting upon these findings in the literature we come to realize that, in addition to deterministic positions, utopian and dystopian metaphors unlock the assumptions made by people In this way, metaphors enhance our understanding of comparisons drawn between the unfamiliar and the familiar, the abstract and the concrete As the concepts of the ‘native’ and the ‘immigrant’ Prensky’s (2001) metaphor of the native and the immigrant is a widely known account of the effects of the digital upon education In it, Prensky offers a narrative of ‘native’ young people’s seamless integration with technology, and the revolutionary changes that information technology brings Prensky warns ‘immigrant’ teachers that they face irrelevance unless they figure out how to adapt their methods and approaches to new generations of learners Taking all these into consideration, we decided to examine teachers’ speech and locate the metaphors embedded in the discussion of what the experience of using digital environments     for pedagogical purposes is like; and with what meaning structures these experiences are linked METHODS AND DATA ANALYSIS The Study Aims In this article, we focus the discussion on the case of a Finnish and a Greek state secondary school language teacher The study is qualitative and uses metaphors as the units of analysis of teacher talk The dataset included teachers specializing in the natural and the human sciences from Finland and Greece We decided, however, to examine these domains separately and selected the area of L1 (i.e., first language) teaching at random The overall aim of the study was to uncover both the professional and cultural contexts of events (Shulman, 1992) through the participants’ speech To meet this end, we selected metaphors that came as responses to questions asking what social media the teachers use for pedagogical purposes; and how the digital tools enhance the TSL process Additionally, in order to understand how the pedagogical meeting changes we selected those discourse segments asking about how the digital domain supports the collaboration with colleagues and students To validate the interview-based data the team of authors-researchers performed an interrater reliability test To this end, metaphors comprising 16% of the dataset were selected at random by one member of the team The other two members arranged the metaphors into notional categories or sets To ensure shared understanding of categories, the researchers used relevant definitions of an approved dictionary, namely the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.oed.com) In this way, the test checked whether the researchers’ interpretations of metaphorical meaning overlapped and to what degree The result indicated high inter-rater reliability (Cronbach α= 0.9) The Participants The selection of the two language teachers was made upon convenience logic As one of the researchers was a teacher herself, the team decided to recruit members of her professional network as participants of the study The approximately two one-hour-long interviews took place in physical and virtual environments The face-to-face interview took place in an International Upper Secondary school in Helsinki There, the participant teaches L1 and English language and literature to Finnish and international 16-17 year-old students The Greek participant -teacher at an Upper Secondary multi-cultural school in Athens- was interviewed online through a web conferencing environment The participants are female and count twenty-two years of teaching experience Both are first language teachers but their expertise is not restricted to the subject-specific domain Their pedagogical orientation extends to the field of media Thus, the Finnish teacher (henceforth fLT= Finnish Language Teacher) adds a seven-year long work in media oriented upper secondary school to her biographical statement This involves several teaching courses on the use of different digital tools, on filming and journalism At the time of the interview, fLT is the administrator of the school-based online environment and responsible for the teachers’ efforts to incorporate the tool into their daily practices A constructivist educational     philosophy underlies her educational choices, as the teacher states The Greek philologist (gLT= Greek Language Teacher) is an ICT trainer, and leads seminars and workshops organized by the Ministry of Education to address teachers’ current needs Her educational philosophy is made explicit through the project-based approach she adopts in teaching Admittedly, gLT is open to new experiences and willing to experiment To evidence her online presence, gLT lists a website and several wikis that she uses as resource spaces for students and trainees; and a weblog hosted on the Greek School Network portal (i.e., the online service that interconnects Greek teachers, students and schools across the country; www.sch.gr) Both fLT and gLT depart from overlapping professional and contextual backgrounds Their academic interests are rooted in the human sciences, in the domain of language teaching Both teachers share a passion for innovation They serve in public schools and teach in multi-cultural environments Given these parameters, this study aims to determine whether the Finnish and the Greek teacher’s metaphors indicate common semantic areas The following questions, therefore, arise: Do the teachers’ metaphors fall within categories indicating semantic overlaps? And, if they do, to what degree? Metaphors in the Language Teachers’ Speech To analyze the teachers’ speech we used metaphor analysis In order to cater for a gap in the literature regarding the description of methods (Schmitt, 2005), we intend to make our analytical tools as explicit as possible in the following lines of this paper According to Schmitt (2005, p 379), metaphor analysis is a complex process Not only the metaphors but also reactions to metaphors have to become straightforward Therefore, the procedure of analysis of content complements the analysis of metaphors Before launching the analysis, however, we needed to define what constitutes a metaphor in this study first To this end, we decided to base inclusion in the metaphor dataset on two main criteria One was the element of contrast or incongruity with the basic meaning Another was transfer of meaning (Ricoeur, 1978; Cameron et al., 2010b) Naturally, this principle extended the metaphorical coverage to each and every word in the dataset Moreover, the identification process was not limited to the word level only; it also applied to the phrase (e.g., adjective-noun, verb-noun, prepositional phrases etc.) Overall, the analysis indicated two broad categories of metaphor: obvious and conventionalized, and novel In the Ricoeurian (1976) theory, at some point in the historical process the extended meaning of a metaphor becomes part of our everyday lexicon through repetition In this way, the polysemy of the words increases and everyday meanings are augmented The fact, therefore, that in the pre-Web era digital environments did not exist explains the absence of the metaphor from speech at that time Nowadays, however, the metaphorical phrase ‘digital environments’ is no longer considered as such Not much transfer of meaning is required, nor is there noteworthy conflict And yet, something has happened to the meaning: the metaphorical is no more The metaphorical, therefore, has become literal This, in Ricoeurian terms, means that the metaphor is ‘dead’, as it hardly carries any innovative     meaning to the digitally enhanced pedagogical meeting However, this is not a study on innovation in speech On the contrary, it aims to diagnose the metaphors of everyday school life These seem to be primarily conventional Other less obvious metaphors offer new information about the reality of the classroom As, for example, does the one that attaches the predicate ‘battlefield’ to the experience of teaching and learning through social media Types of metaphors found in the dataset also include personifications (e.g., the ‘university’ as a living organism) and similes (e.g., like a ‘notice board’) For the identification process we used insights from the conceptual and the discourse dynamics approach Unlike conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), where a primary role to thought over language is assigned, the dynamic model sees in metaphorical language the synergy of a variety of cognitive processes (Gibbs and Cameron, 2008) In addition, the dynamic view bases the analysis upon the subtleties of meaning The latter link the ways metaphors are used with an account of the ways language is used and interpreted (Barsalou, 2008; Ritchie, 2010) In our analysis we found that subtleties of meaning are also located in prepositional phrases Quite a few (e.g., ‘in the Net’, ‘in the Internet’) are obvious and with an overwhelming presence in the speech of both language teachers Importantly, though, they convey major concepts, such as locality and containment Having identified metaphorical meaning in words and phrases we worked inductively and attributed as specific labels as possible We did so in order to avoid over-interpretation of the data (Cameron et al 2010b, p 130) In many cases we applied actual words that appeared in the transcript The first codes were re-processed towards more abstract labels Sets of systematic metaphors emerged out of the process According to Cameron, Low and Maslen (2010a, p 127) systematic metaphors are linguistic metaphors that connect with a particular topic or theme One of the major systematic metaphors of the study, such as concretization, emerged as a result of revising groups of codes that semantically converged into the notion of ‘rendering solid or united and kept within limits at a particular place’ As table below shows, lexical items and clusters were coded as ‘thing’, ‘locality’ and ‘containment’ first Then they were reassigned to the systematic set of concretization Table Examples of systematic sets in the Finnish teacher’s speech: concretization Concretization kind of, kinds of, stuff, a bit (Thing: object; a concrete entity) what, whatever thing, something, everything tool   Concretization (Locality: a particular place, situation, location) there Concretization In: the classroom   (Containment: to keep within limits; to enclose, bound) In: the internet; the net; the fronter In: small groups; pairs   All in all, the analysis of discourse activity of fLT and gLT revealed 1763 and 1010 lines or intonation units (i.e., stretches of speech that often coincide with a single breath) respectively and seven topical units in each interview For the purposes of this article, the focus is cast upon the second topical unit (or discourse segment) of each teacher’s speech In them participants discussed the digital environments they use and the ways they integrate social networking platforms to enhance the pedagogical meeting As table below shows, in fLT’s case the physical reality of the classroom mainly blends with the school’s networking environment (i.e., Fronter), Google Documents and Facebook Facebook almost exclusively occupies gLT’s talk in the correspondent segment Bracketed numbers in the Tools column indicate line-stretches in each interview Table Digital environments for teaching-studying-learning Discourse Segment 2: Digital environments in teaching practice fLT Tools Metaphors (total number of lines) (intonation units) Fronter, Google Documents, Facebook (357: line 51- line 408) 138 (103) gLT Facebook 194 (338: line 79 – line 417) (152) Evidently, the metaphor per intonation unit (bracketed in the right column) ratio indicates the presence of more than one metaphor in each line-stretch with metaphors ranging from highly conventionalized to novel at both the word and the phrase level Overall, as we will discuss in the following sections, increase in the metaphorical power seemed to be directly associated with instances of talk concerning context-dependent situations and inversely associated with shared metaphors More particularly, in gLT’s speech, novel and strong metaphors (e.g., ‘the secret school on Facebook’, which also bears allusions to the part of the Greek history concerning the War of Independence) appear when the teacher discusses situations of controversy arising in the local educational context FINDINGS: SHARED AND CONTEXT-DEPENDENT METAPHORS Common ground in the language teachers’ metaphors As depicted in figure below, analysis indicated four major categories of semantic overlap     These are expressed through the notions of concretization, action, sociality and movement in both teachers’ talk   Fig The distribution of shared metaphors in the language teachers’ speech As we discussed in the previous section, concretization emerged as a result of revising initial groups of metaphors that semantically converged into the notion of ‘rendering solid or united and kept within limits at a particular place’ The second systematic set contains metaphors that vary in the manner of action they depict The patterns that associate with the notion of ‘accomplishment of a thing usually over a period of time, in stages, or with the possibility of repetition’ are those of: • physical action: of or relating to the body; action that requires use of the body or part(s) of the body to be accomplished • conjoint action: united; related to, made up of, or carried on by two or more in combination; • interaction: mutual or reciprocal action or influence; • agency: the capacity, condition, or state of acting; and • adding: joining or uniting so as to bring about an increase or improvement In the Greek teacher’s case the ‘action’ group contains metaphors that, again, vary in the manner of action they depict The patterns that associate with the general notion of action are overall similar to those identified in fLT’s speech Nevertheless, the notion of ‘adding’ is substituted by ‘attraction’ and the idea of ‘the action of a body or substance in drawing to itself, by some physical force, another to which it is not materially attached’, or of ‘the force thus exercised’ is introduced Despite differences between the Finnish and the Greek educational context, overlap in the   10   category of action marks another area where the conceptualization of teaching is shared Thus, the two teachers’ thinking links their pedagogical purposes with physical action, interaction and joint action as means that promote human agency The major systematic metaphor of sociality relates to the notion of ‘tendency to associate or form in social groups’ It builds up from the sets of ‘identification with a group’ and ‘connectedness’ (i.e., the state of being connected; joined or linked together) The former manifests through the use of the pronoun ‘we’ and the latter through the use of expressions such as ‘links to all kinds of wikis’, ‘joined the discussion’ etc In addition to the sets identified in the Finnish teacher’s metaphors, in gLT’s talk the topic of sociality is further subdivided into notions of: • access, i.e., the ability to approach or communicate with a person or thing; • affective connection, being one of the fundamental qualities characterizing the establishment and development of bonds between human beings; and • visibility / presence, i.e., the fact or condition of being present; the state of being with or in the same place as a person or thing; attendance, company, society, or association Table below presents the categories, sub-divisions, and linguistic metaphors that constitute the semantic group of sociality in gLT’s speech In this representation intonation units are separated with a semi-colon and different linguistic metaphors are marked with bold-type in each sub-division Table Systematic sets in the Greek teacher’s speech: sociality Sociality Access/ membership an account called; ‘the account of the class’; an account was created; and they became friends with it; this account; it’s the same account who are also friends on Facebook Sociality Identification with group Sociality Connectedness/ and this is where we meet; we used for the project as well; we played a game together; that we had created; we log in; about our school’s closing down was made; when we would discuss it faceto-face; we got a one-year extension; because we did a study this year; but we didn’t make it; but we added up their scores; developed in our team We log in; on social networks (2); and someone logged in; Sociality therefore they see the updates; also several Visibility / presence colleagues see me; they see the posts   Sociality emotionally attached to the school Affective connection it made them worry 11   The fourth shared group relates to ‘movement’ and involves the notions of ‘dwelling’, ‘origin’ and ‘continuation’ The Greek language teacher connects this meaning to different thematic areas One associates the social networking environment with a destination point (a notion she articulates through ‘I migrated there’) This is the space where, leaving the Greek School Network (www.sch.gr), she relocates her virtual classroom in order to establish a new meeting corner for herself and the students, following the latter’s’ hangout choice According to gLT, for her students Facebook functions as an information source, a space they ‘resort’ to when worried about the school’s enforced closure Another interrelated theme is that of ‘continuation’ and is associated with implications arising when external factors impede, for example, syllabus progression In fLT’s speech movement is expressed through the notions of directionality (e.g., ‘to the discussion board’) and achievement (e.g., ‘get the grade’ ‘get through the course’) Variance in context-dependent metaphorical sets The following sets reflect particular characteristics of the working and wider environment in the teachers’ speech As figure shows, these metaphors fall within two main variant groups   Fig The distribution of contextual metaphors in the language teachers’ speech In fLT’s speech, the metaphor set of structure relates the notion of teaching to ‘activity arranged in a definite pattern of organization’ More particularly, the topic is subdivided into: • •   (work) pattern: a reliable sample of traits, acts, tendencies, or other observable characteristics of a person, group, or institution (e.g., ’[work] with one project,text, or presentation’); and basis: the principal component of something; something on which something else is established or based (e.g., ‘based on a book; on philosophy and literature; the syllabus’) 12   The notion of control involves the sub-areas of task distribution, time allocated by teachers for task completion and course management In gLT’s discourse, context-dependent metaphors are assigned to notions that associate with controversial situations, the disclosure-concealment binary, and student initiative DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS Value-based pedagogical use of social media For the Finnish language teacher the integration is a concrete entity, clearly shaped and specified in the way that teaching tools (e.g., pen, blackboard etc.) have been for the teaching profession for ages and embedded in the pedagogical thinking along with values and purposes By concretizing the networking experience, the Finnish language teacher creates a solid platform to deal with the new situation (Kim et al., 1998) In this sense, fLT manages the ‘new’ by building a bridge between that and the ‘old’ way Through the analysis of fLT’s discourse it becomes evident that she associates the pedagogical meeting with school-based environments (e.g., Fronter) and collaborative platforms (e.g., wikis and Google applications) that are detached from the use-value networking of the social media (Stewart, 2011) As Stewart puts it (2011), social media enable people to connect on terms beyond those of use-value networking The relational feature, however, has been compromised by applications that cultivate the status over relationships behavior ‘Status is part of the game’, Stewart claims and goes on to argue, ‘But when it becomes the whole game, the broad, rhizomatic networks get boxed in and wither’ In the end, it is this type of evolution of the social media that generates the following dispute: Are the social media actually social? And that, subsequently, leads to the question: What kind of world the social media create? Obviously, fLT’s attitude does not negate the pedagogical value of integrating social networking environments and tools On the contrary, she embraces her digital identity in manifold ways that sustain Clark’s (2003) aphorism of humans and, subsequently, of teachers, as ‘natural-born cyborgs’ She creates a Facebook group for herself and her students to post announcements with subject-specific, learning-related content It turns out, however, that this is not a long-lasting practice The profound influence of the social media on the daily practices of members of the global culture is depicted on numbers: Facebook users numbered 750 million, as of July 2011, thus far exceeding the population of most countries on the planet Social networking sites not solely attract users on a global scale The corporate world has found an open space for applications tailored to needs informed by profiles In a sense, applications not only invade the user’s life and mind but compromise privacy as well Finally, the Finnish teacher’s pedagogical thinking shifts from popular social virtual communities back to the school-based digital environment But does fLT’s choice to put Facebook aside relate to moral panic? Obviously, it does not According to boyd (2012), moral panic arises from the intersection of youth with technology Since their advent in 2003, social network sites have become the equivalent of the movie,   13   theater, a place where adolescents can hang out with friends and peers (boyd et al, 2011) This teacher uses the site to post announcements and create a space for subject teaching The students are trusted while their profiles remain off-topic as it used to be in the era prior to the digital revolution What activates the return to the ‘given’? According to research findings (Mazer et al., 2007, p 4), the use of Facebook signifies exiting the controlled communication event of the classroom to meet students in their territory Therefore, as a space of socialization, Facebook contrasts with the structural elements shaping what is considered ‘normal’ or ‘given’ in the school reality What does our case indicate then? Do the informal, the casual, and the multimodal fit in to date’s pedagogical meeting? Do teachers feel ready to disclose more of their selves? Our findings indicate that neither question can receive a positive response to this point Shift in student-teacher relationship dynamics Concretization is a significant pattern in the Greek teacher’s speech as well, given that it ranks high in the list of shared metaphors In both cases technology is treated as a tool that enhances learning (Niemi et al, 2012) However, there is a difference in application: while fLT’s need for concreteness is accommodated in school-based platforms, gLT’s is not On the contrary, gLT migrates from the School Network to Facebook to meet her students There she discovers students’ unexpected emotions when the school is faced with the possibility of enforced closure Although social networking sites are mainly used as spaces for hanging out (boyd et al, 2011), the Greek teacher and her class combine sociality with schoolwork on Facebook A sense of community seems to emerge, evident in the Greek teacher’s frequent use of lexical items (such as ‘we’ and ‘our’) that express a degree of identification with this group of students Affective elements of sociality present in gLT’s speech also show a tendency to change the traditional teacher-student relationship The two fundamental pillars of the school community, the teacher and the student, are getting in closer proximity Are we then fortunate enough to witness an enhanced student-teacher relationship in the digital era? Additionally, the Greek teacher decides to introduce Facebook-embedded collaborative games Also she experiments with tools that combine learning with fun The pedagogical meeting stretches out As research findings indicate (Siewiorek et al., 2010), different leadership styles and skills emerge in gaming situations Discussing the virtual gaming experience, gLT uses metaphors to describe student initiative and leadership In her speech leadership is a quality that requires ‘strength’ (‘[she] took the whole thing on her shoulders’) and emerges when the team members are under pressure to achieve a pre-agreed goal On the other end of the scale, the leader is a person who ‘stands out’, who others ‘refer to’ and ‘ask guidance from’ At the same time, the profile of students (e.g., ‘they resorted there’, ‘they found out from the internet’) with enhanced initiative is sketched in gLT’s talk Controversial situations, metaphors and pedagogical purposes As we discussed above, external factors give rise to controversial issues that interfere with gLT’s teaching action This is expressed through conventional metaphorical utterances, e.g.,   14   ‘I could not quite move on with the syllabus’, ‘…a completely wasted [teaching] hour’; as well as a few powerful metaphors, e.g ‘the class came in decimated’ The analysis of the metaphor ‘they are burning inside’ takes us deeper into gLT’s thinking on the one hand; on the other, it frames the notion of student emotional attachment to school It also indicates that the pedagogical thinking is, among others, occupied by the anxiety of school closure In the metaphor, the oxidation process is transferred onto the students’ feelings The image of rapid evolution of heat conveys the group members’ shared heated interest against decisions that eventually terminate school life For the students, school closure means the breakage of their community’s connecting tissue And yet, the opportunity for building up critical ability is not taken toward this end Nor is the communitarian spirit underlying the networked experience fostered No action is taken by teachers or students to rectify an unfair governmental decision Controversial situations also tie with the ‘disclosure–concealment’ metaphorical set A law demonizes the use of social media and mobile technologies in Greek education School administrators hold a prejudiced stance against social media Colleagues are skeptical Within this framework, it seems only natural that the ‘school-as-impediment’ category emerges To convey the meaning of restrictiveness within the school culture, the Greek teacher uses phrases like the ‘obstacle is the school itself’ Other contrasting ideas are expressed through ‘the secret school on Facebook’ and ‘nothing hides under the Internet’ Interestingly, both metaphors link with the issue of transparency-privacy As boyd (2012) discusses, ‘The Internet makes visible things that we want to see, but it also makes visible things that we don't want to see’ The fear that the scalability of visibility provokes is, thus, magnified In the Greek teacher’s case, visibility threatens to disturb the delicate equilibrium of progressive and non-progressive forces in the school culture The Greek teacher is not taken aback; instead, she pursues the goal of integration While she does so, however, she does not grab the opportunity to change the metaphor of the school culture The delicate equilibrium remains The quest for open, boundless pedagogical meeting through the use of social media is again suspended Another aspect of visibility relates to student privacy in gLT’s speech To resolve this issue, the teacher advises her students to use pseudonyms as a measurement of protection Implicit in this position is the notion of the ‘network power’ As boyd (2012) explains, technology destabilizes power: ‘It's no longer simply about broadcasting a message; it's about setting in motion mechanisms to draw attention to you’ The problematic arises again: Does pseudonymity on its own suffice to address implications of attention to the self successfully? What is the role of the networked profile? Can teenagers’ posts and discussions rise above the trivial? In what ways can the pedagogical meeting enhance the transcendence to critical thinking in the digital experience? At the intersection of the pedagogical meeting with the digital we can see that both female teachers’ web presence becomes visible It is, thus, interpretable and exhibits the quality of the ‘cyborg’ self (Adams & Pente, 2011), which both language teachers embrace This   15   characteristic of female cyborg presence not only adds positively to the issue of gender equity in social media (Tu et al., 2011) It also contributes to the reconstruction of the teachers’ professional identity This new situation of the integration of the digital into the pedagogical reflects Tirri’s (2012; 2011) research findings that practicing teachers’ main concerns extend beyond subject matter mastery Within the realms of the transformed identity, therefore, the Finnish and the Greek language teachers integrate the digital tools to enhance the learning process This, however, is reminiscent of Bauman’s (2012) metaphorical caution‘… one can use axes to hew wood or to cut heads The choice does not belong to axes but to those who hold them Whatever the holders’ choices, the axes won’t mind…’ Following the analysis of the Finnish and the Greek teachers’ metaphors, a new set of questions seems to appear: Who is exercising the power of the axes in our cases? Is the power in the hands of those who use the tools to create an enriched learning experience? While these questions make the pedagogy–technology conflicting relationship visible, the following one links the study findings with dystopian-utopian arguments: In what ways are the teachers’ metaphors similar or different from those found in the existing literature?   CONCLUSIONS Considering the above discussion, we can hardly claim that our study results in generalizable findings across the population of teachers in Finland or in Greece Such claim would, at any rate, contradict the initial design, aims and purposes of the research What we can safely argue, however, is that our findings frame a whole new perspective in teachers’ thinking; as well as that the study reveals new sets of questions seeking for investigation One such question concerns the metaphors of teachers rooted in the natural sciences Do they convey similar meaning structures to those of the language teachers’? What insights into the digitally enhanced pedagogical meeting they offer? Another research interest draws upon social networking sites as spaces where argumentation is built upon the use of text, image and video Undoubtedly, teacher use of social networking sites, such as Facebook, is rapidly increasing nowadays Whether this applicability intends to supplement classroom practice or not, the features embedded in the digital experience (e.g., networked profile, status updates, discussions etc.) constitute manifestations of new genres of discourse In turn, these new genres open up new research avenues and venues Evidently, this study is an initial attempt to configure how teachers think about technology and what they take as the truth about it Both language teachers make use of own knowledge of the media, transform it into practical knowledge and, through informed intuition (Hussu et al, 2003), take the risk and integrate the tools into daily practices Both teachers make bold decisions and integrate the social media into the studying-learning process In this way, they not only exhibit sensitivity to current needs; they also appear sensitive to their students’ needs by immersing themselves into a field where the latter’s expertise is often indisputable (Adams et al., 2011) Technological expertise, however, neither equates nor negates pedagogical expertise This leads to the conclusion that the pedagogical integration of digital technologies is far more   16   complex than a set of rules that teachers need to apply In fact, this type of complexity involves issues of both process and content and, as a result, puts the ‘immigrant’ teacher‘native’ student metaphor at stake Moreover, as Zhou and Xu (2011) argue, the use of technology in teaching requires teacher exposure to integrated knowledge This exposure should occur during all the phases of pre- and in-service professional development Regarding their professional growth, fLT and gLT are pioneers in the teaching field They articulate thoughts and discuss decisions and actions concerning essential aspects of human experience (e.g., space as expressed in the category of locality) (Polkinghorne, 1983) This indicates their concern that the digitally enhanced pedagogical meeting is a safe space and guarantees student privacy In this way, they cater for the requirements of the networked society These involve the augmentation of social connections and the ability to access different types of networks Students, therefore, as Pegrum (2010) argues, need to develop a critical social networking literacy in order to develop awareness of meanings underlying building and maintaining large and diverse networks; and of ways that enable access to informed perspectives and specialized information Teacher practice, therefore, should envelop this dimension of the integration as well A consideration of the above and of the way the Internet and social media evolve shapes emergent questions and, subsequently, our current problematic Does the application of the digital, as discussed in the study, signify the destruction of old, dystopic metaphors? 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