Part II: The Homework

Video. What We Took Home: Putting TPD Into Practice (transcript)

Video. What Home Makes Possible: Institutional TPD (transcript)

Video. Making TPD-Based Arguments: In Pursuit of Institutional Support and Rhetorical Education (transcript)

Sponsors are not enough to foster the sustained TPD necessary for an individual to afford the time and technological support to engage in learning experiences that translate to classroom practice. In this way, we concur with Mesut Duran, Stein Brunvand, Justin Ellsworth, and Serkan Sendag (2012) who, in their study of a long-term wiki-based professional-development project, asserted that “training in educational technology often focuses more on learning to use the technology rather than learning how to teach with the technology” (p. 314). This is particularly true when funding for PhD students or contingent faculty is limited, or when the tenure clock is ticking. From our experience and at our institutions, TPD often means learning a trendy or recently purchased software, hardware, or platform during a brown bag lunch. Dickie Selfe (2004) described this as the "innoculation approach." Faculty attend, are shown a technology, and are set free into the world without the rhetorical, scholarly, or pedagogical depth required to truly implement the technology. Further, we all felt as though we left our TPD experiences able to proselytize about the necessary merits of a multimodal-focused pedagogy, but (again) the resources necessary to foster change in our institutions has been, at times, elusive.