Rethinking the Conceptualization of the Hybrid Educator Role

The beautiful part about being a scholar is that colleagues inspire you to think, rethink, and reconsider your work, always pushing you to become better and to seek greater clarity in the work that we do. I recently posted entries about conceptualizing the hybrid role and conceptualizing a specific role in a specific PDS context known as the PDA or Professional Development Associate. These entries were inspired by a colleague of mine who is struggling with understanding her identity as a hybrid educator. While posting these entries, I realized that my frameworks might need some modification. Although this colleague generically fits into part of some of these categories, there was no location that situated her identity in the framework - my colleague is a part-time graduate student, mentor teacher, school-based hybrid educator. Essentially, she is a link between university-based and school-based hybrid educators because she is taking doctoral classes and is enrolled in a doctoral program. My original frameworks did not define this space specifically, so I have modified the framework to include the following. The graduate student as hybrid educator is a fascination for me and possible a future source of research. Your feedback is welcome in helping me adjust and readjust this framework.

This revised image shows that there are two kinds of university faculty - tenure track and non-tenure track faculty who assume this role. It also shows that graduate students can be full time or part time in their enrollment status in a graduate program. Reassigned teachers can be either enrolled part time or not enrolled at all and the same is true for mentor teachers - they can be enrolled part time or not enrolled in a graduate program.