Teachers Turning to Teachers: Teacherpreneurial Behaviors in Social Media

Abstract

There is growing evidence that educators engage in social media and virtual social networks across formal and informal settings to direct the trajectory of their curriculum. Interactions within and across virtual spaces provide opportunities to flatten hierarchical structures as teachers may directly or indirectly engage with educational decision making and reform implementation (e.g., Supovitz et al. 2015). This article examines an educational phenomenon, the emergence of a teacherpreneurial guild—that is, a teacher collective promoting professional practices, norms, and entrepreneurial activity—creating and defining knowledge underlying educational practices and classroom behaviors. Using a sample of Midwestern elementary teachers, this work identifies patterns of online educational resource access over 4 years across 135,000 pins shared within Pinterest, a social media platform. Results indicate teachers most often turn to one another for resources and professional materials. This may have implications for trust developed within teacherpreneurial guilds and teachers’ ability to exert agency within their profession.