Guidelines and regulations for teaching digital competence in schools and Teacher education: A weak link?

Abstract

Teacher education has recently been criticised for not fulfilling its obligation to adequately prepare teachers to utilise digital tools in the classroom. In this paper, we raise the question of why Norwegian teacher education does not prepare student teachers to integrate digital tools into their teaching as required by the Norwegian curriculum. We question the formal premises governing the development of digital competence in teacher education and how they correspond with the requirements of the Norwegian national education curriculum. To gain insight into this question, we analysed how digital competence is presented in the official key documents that create the framework for teacher education, and compared them to the requirements of the Norwegian National Curriculum. Our findings indicate that there is a weak link between the curriculum and the premises for digital competence in teacher education.