Building a community of inquiry on Perusall: Using a social constructivist approach to empower teachers as 'TLA experts'

Abstract

Situated within the context of teacher education, this paper examines how a group of 30 pre- and in-service teachers (T) of English on a Master of Education Language Awareness (LA) course at a university in Hong Kong are empowered as ‘TLA experts’ on Perusall, take part in a series of synergized asynchronous and synchronous activities via Perusall designed by their instructor and experience significant TLA gains. Adopting the Community of Inquiry (COI) framework developed by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000), the paper analyzes teacher learning in the three interrelated domains of social presence, instructor presence and cognitive presence. Guided by the social constructivist approach to teaching and learning and building on the ‘Perusall Managers’ model introduced by Tavares (2021), the teachers on the LA course are assigned by their instructor to be ‘TLA experts’ of designated areas. With a clearly defined focus and from different angles, these ‘experts’ initiate and facilitate exchanges on Perusall as they take charge of the analysis of texts in the form of authentic textbook and classroom-discourse excerpts. Acknowledging one another’s visible social presence on the platform by their leadership and management of discussions, the ‘experts’ report enjoying their collaborative inquiry and working closely as a COI to “complete a puzzle to form a whole picture together” which challenges them to think from multiple perspectives and deepens their theoretical understanding. The paper discusses how the instructor makes use of the functionalities on Perusall to amplify instructor presence, boost the experts’ confidence, and promote timely and ongoing professional dialogues, thereby tightening their bonding as a COI in their journey of knowledge co-construction. It highlights how social presence and instructor presence impact positively on the experts’ motivation to interact and engage with the course content and texts, which in turn strengthens their cognitive presence. Specifically, emphasis is placed on how the instructor pedagogically organizes the interactive learning environment, tasks and activities in the synchronous virtual LA classroom amid the COVID-19 pandemic to further sharpen the experts’ critical thinking skills, and foster a climate conducive to their re-evaluation and re-interpretation of their analyses of more complex topics via Perusall. The design of the end-of-the-LA-course assessment to reinforce their TLA is also explored. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications for the teachers-as-TLA-experts initiative and makes recommendations on ways of maximizing the affordances of Perusall in teacher learning and empowerment.