Performing Digital Citizenship in Teacher Education: Female Teacher Educators' Rights Claiming through Cyberspace in Punjab, Pakistan
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55737/trt/FL25.169Keywords:
Digital Citizenship, Teacher Education, Rights Claims, Constructivist Grounded Theory, Female Educators, Pakistan, CyberspaceAbstract
This paper examines how female teacher educators in Punjab, Pakistan, enact digital citizenship using rights-claiming practices in cyberspace. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, semi-structured interviews were held through Zoom with twenty-seven female participants. The NVivo 15 program with AI-assisted coding was used to analyse the data, employing constant comparative methods and theoretical sampling. It gave rise to three theoretical concepts: Negotiating digital professional presence, claiming pedagogical autonomy through digital acts, and resisting gendered digital surveillance. The results show that female teacher educators practice digital citizenship based on explicit and implicit rights claim-making through everyday digital activities to negotiate tensions among institutional callings, technological closings, and transformative openings. These practices cut across institutional, gendered, and national spaces and thus form a transversal space of cyberspace, which can be regarded as an intersection of professional and gendered identity. This research adds theoretical knowledge on the ways marginalised educational professionals practice performative rights-claiming practices, which develop the conceptualisation of digital citizenship outside of Western settings.
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