This dissertation is positioned as asynchronous educator professional development and is designed and written to be an experience (spotlighting the rhetorical potentials of text-based asynchronous engagement). It attempts to call attention to, through its design, the very things it discusses. In this way, this dissertation is self-reflexive and highly self-aware; a meta-methodological approach to (and about) asynchronous educator professional development. This dissertation uses methodological bricolage, weaving a series of mixed-methods approaches to make sense of everything from the current state of educator professional development, to the purpose of higher education, and even the meaning of life, as a means to visibilize how we might do and make differently within educator professional development because educator professional development.It bridges conversations and tells multiple stories of the intersections of asynchronous digital learning experiences and educator professional development, including stories of the author’s own professional development journey (which serve as a situated and contextualized mechanism for locating educator professional development and asynchronous digital learning within and across Academia). This dissertation demonstrates that we are limited by attempts to design around singular perspectives and binary notions of professional development. It calls upon cross-disciplinary scholarship and the stories of others in order to argue that if we are to come to an understanding of what educator professional development is, as well as the role(s) asynchronous digital learning experiences play with the context of educator professional development, we must engage with the ever-shifting constellation of lived experiences that make educator professional development what it is today and what it might become into the future. It leverages several constellating rhetorical theories as lenses through which to view, understand, and interpret the worlds of educator professional development and asynchronous digital learning, advancing that how we come to educator professional development, specifically professional development facilitated through asynchronous digital learning experiences, impacts how we experience it and what we make from it. This dissertation intentionally doesn’t provide an answer to the challenges of educator professional development; in fact, it intentionally attempts to avoid an answer. It concludes that there are no singular conclusions, and relies on multiple rhetorical lenses and theories to argue that perhaps this is the most significant conclusion of all. The point is, that like educator professional development and asynchronous digital learning experiences, this dissertation is not and will never be about one thing or mean one thing, or be experienced in one way. It is, and will be, what readers make of it. As a result, this dissertation contradicts itself at times. It dares readers to get lost and even attempts to intentionally facilitate getting lost, as a means to invite readers into direct dialogue with rhetorical theory as applied to asynchronous educator professional development through experiencing it. It is meant to be an invitation...to muse, to wander, to imagine, to feel, to dialogue. While the “jury’s still out” on what the future holds, this piece will hopefully make you laugh, will optimistically validate your lived experiences, and ideally be meaningful to you in at least some way, helping you make sense of something and supporting you on your own work in and around educator professional development, whether you are a learner or a designer in that space.
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