INFLUENCE OF LAW AND ETHICS

USING ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKING Facebook WITH STUDENTS IN LEARNING AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

“As teachers, we respect our trusted position in society and recognise the influence we have on learners, their understanding of the world and the future wellbeing of our society.” –NZ Code of Professional Responsibility and Standards for the Teaching Profession.

My interests in this topic is huge as is the nature of the topic, which has moral and ethical issues that are applicable to learners within New Zealand education system and its code of conduct. Both, teacher and student are obliged to be responsible in their code of conduct but the teacher is more responsible and accountable as they are in a position to be the role models to the young learners.

We live in a world which is conditioned with certain social and societal norms that have a common understanding of what makes a good behavior. Every culture has its own set of code of conduct depending on what they could tolerate and what they cannot. To me as a teacher, what is more challenging is be mindful of the boundaries that I layout for my students. The dilemma about meeting the teacher code of conduct gets more complicated with the emerging technologies and the social networking it brings with it. Sometimes the boundaries appear to be blurred between public-private, personal-professional and school and work. The only social networking platform I use is the Facebook and I use it extensively for my profession, which is Visual art. Our school has restricted FB access to the students and the teachers as a preventive measure for unwanted social publicity of any untoward event. In some cases I was even told that the MOE teachers’ code of conduct doesn’t encourage teachers to be friendly with students on social media. However, it also mentions that if we do then it comes with an amount of risk and that the teacher should be willing to take that risk. I made an appeal to the school leadership and made my point to convince that the access to FB on a school network is an opportunity to be responsible.

According to Henderson et al. (2014) the teachers have their own out of school identities that are private. They also say that this need to be protected as it is a professional expectation. I think that this would be a case if the teacher mixes up their personal and professional life to an extent that whatever is posted may have a risk of building a profile that may have risk to their profession They also mention that the recent research also has revealed an increase in the use of social media in a classroom context. This was once again estimated to be a risk to the teachers’ professional context.  I do agree and am aware of the consequences of interacting with students on a social network in my personal time after school hours on a social network. But my point is to get across a message to the same young learners with whom I interact, that social networking can also be used as a convenient platform for communication apart from what is it identified with as being negatively popular for all kinds of unethical and unprofessional indulgences.

Perhaps being an artist myself and having my entire international professional artists available on one platform, it is very convenient for me to get connected and connect my young learners to them on Facebook. I took the risk of interacting with my students via their private profiles and I made it possible to interact with them by creating a separate group. I mainly used this as a resource to their research and as an inspiration to their work. I set the required boundaries to this membership and made it aware to them that this is exclusively used for learning purposes and everything that is shared on this platform will be relating to visual arts only. To make it more relevant I also invited alumni students to participate and share their work and experiences on this FB group. Although the students were accessible to my personal profile, they know their boundaries and I do have restrictions on my privacy settings. However, since I use this social network for professional purposes, I am mindful about what I post and how what I post is useful to others.

I think we need to consider that although we are teachers and have a certain responsibility towards society, we are still part of a wider community where we all exist in a socially constructed space. Every kind of learning happens in different spaces. Be it in a farm, in the four walls of a classroom or in a virtual space, the responsibilities are still the same. What could be violated on a virtual space can also happen in a physical space.  The consequences are still the same.   I don’t see anything wrong in allowing the students to peep into my personal life as I am sure they will be learning something useful even there.

Henderson, M., Auld, G., & Johnson, N. F. (2014). Ethics of Teaching with Social Media. Paper presented at the Australian Computers in Education Conference 2014, Adelaide, SA. Retrieved from http://acec2014.acce.edu.au/session/ethics-teaching-socialmedia.