Pedagogical hesitations in a mobile technology rich learning environment: A self-study of redefining expertise

Abstract

At a time when advances in technologies continue to demand swift responses from education at all levels, we have used self-study to frame a critical discussion of the issues surrounding the impact of mobile technologies on teacher education, and on ourselves as teacher educators. As a group of lecturers in a large Faculty of Education, we identified possibilities for using mobile technologies in teaching practice beyond traditional models of teaching as transmission. We have researched our own practices in a way that helped us to imagine our teaching differently and enabled a sensitivity to pedagogy as a complex process. The study was underpinned by three key concepts: mobile learning as a conversational framework; feedback to make learning visible; and transformational teacher education. By working together as a collective, our experiences of individually integrating mobile technologies into our teaching were shared with others in the group through creative writing, observations, group debriefings, and journals. Through dialogic self-study conversations we were able to provoke and concentrate our tacit knowledge, examine how events were performed, challenge interpretations, offer alternatives, and thus rethink our experiences with technology in our lessons. Three issues arose from our analysis of the self-study data: issues of vulnerability; issues about the way we discerned and acted upon the feedback provided by our students; and the tension in our model(s) of teacher education. Our explorations on the educative value of mobile technologies challenged and changed our pedagogies in ways we had not thought possible before. We concluded that teaching in the future will almost definitely become increasingly dependent on technology yet expert teachers will always be defined by their expertise in the teaching role rather than their technical prowess.