Teacher educator in a digital age: A study of transformative agency

Abstract

Digitalization pushes teacher educators (TEds) worldwide to consider if, and when, traditional educational practices work, and when students and society would benefit from developing the practices. In this article, we investigate some problem situations that emerge when Norwegian TEds and schoolteachers develop educational practices. The context is a 10 ECTS course named “Teacher educator in a digital age”, where the main task required that the participants developed and implemented a project in their classes, which they believed would enhance their own and/or their students' professional digital competence (PDC). We investigate how, and by what means, they pulled themselves and each other out of different problem situations. Some of the problem situations are presented in academic essays about the projects, while others we observed as they discussed their projects in supervision sessions. Our unit of analysis is “transformative agency,” and we use Vygotsky's concept of double stimulation when analyzing the data. The study shows that a broad repertoire of resources (i.e., digital technologies, the literature and task, the “learning community” and the national curriculum) stimulates transformative agency and promotes PDC in ways that place the interest of teachers in focus when facing the digital surge. Some of the challenges that remain unresolved prepare the ground for a discussion about how such a course could be adjusted to better meet the needs of today's schools and teacher education. Research focusing on PDC and transformative agency is highly restricted, and the article is a thematic and methodological contribution to the field.