An Exploration of Digital Technologies in Teacher Education: TPCK Framework

Abstract

“This paper investigates pre-service teachers’ experiences with digital technologies within the context of a 12-month, elementary teacher education program. The principal investigator of the project shadowed pre-service teachers through each of their content area courses in order to identify moments of disruption in pre-service teachers existing conceptions of how to integrate digital technologies into classroom practice. Atlas.ti was used to explore the transcripts from 26 exit interviews of pre-service teachers enrolled in the program. Findings reveal that technological knowledge is often positioned in diametric opposition to content knowledge and/or pedagogical knowledge. In addition, digital technologies using the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework is not a unidirectional process (Koehler & Mishra, 2008). Instead, each body of knowledge interacts with other existing and transient bodies of knowledge to create an emergent, at times even new, body of knowledge.”