Developing digital smarts in initial teacher education: What motivates new teachers to continue using digital technologies for learning?

Abstract

The New Zealand Curriculum, the overarching curriculum document for both primary and secondary education, enshrines an expectation that teachers engage in Teaching as Inquiry. This is seen as linking to both evidence-informed practice and evolving pedagogical content knowledge. In a rapidly developing, complex mobile digital education, the need for teachers to constantly evolve their technological pedagogical content knowledge is pressing. In initial teacher education (ITE), one challenge is how teacher educators support ITE students’ development of evidence-informed reflective practices with digital technologies to match their content knowledge. For ITE students, this is heightened because they are growing their pedagogical knowledge concurrently with learning to incorporate digital technologies in lessons, mostly for the first time. ITE students are in the position of working out how to appropriate unfamiliar digital affordances and devices for learning in unfamiliar classrooms of students, in unfamiliar schools, and sometimes teaching unfamiliar content. The focus of this chapter is, through a qualitative, thematically analysed study of 74 ITE students, an examination of their efforts in this regard via online postings about their practicum experiences as they experimented with digital technologies in secondary school classrooms. The key question for the study was What do secondary graduate ITE students come to value regarding using digital technologies in learning contexts? Findings showed these students creatively applied digital technologies to learning contexts, while adapting to differences among schools and their technological constraints or affordances. Findings also suggest that continuance theory can help understand ITE students’ decisions about what prompts them to continue using digital technologies for learning, and how continuance theory links to agency, structures and cultural practices.