Learning to Teach with Technology: Traversing the Initial Teacher Education Landscape

Abstract

Embedding technology into education is a global phenomenon. While the New Zealand government has invested large sums of money into building the technology infrastructure within schools and early childhood centres, and supporting teacher in-service learning to utilise digital technologies in the last few years, there is a dearth of in-depth studies in the teacher education context that examine the lived experiences of learning to teach with and through digital technologies. This research focuses on understanding how digital technology enables professional learning for three Chinese students as they navigate the journey of becoming early childhood educators in the New Zealand teacher education context. I draw on the concept of complexity thinking to study teacher education as an interconnected, dynamic, and complex system that configures students’ learning journeys. I use a bricolage method (Kincheloe, 2001) to guide the investigative process. This bricolage accommodates the relationship between me‒a bricoleur‒and the objects of this research. Participant observation, document analysis, individual interview, and focus group interviews are the main sources of data. The key findings show that Mandarin-speaking student teachers, who value connectedness, group harmony, diligence in learning and academic achievement, need to construct a cultural identity which achieves a balance between two different cultures when learning to teach. Technology, as an evolving nexus of devices and learning tools, is a constant and is important to student teachers’ professional learning. A variety of interdependent factors, such as the affordances provided by digital and mobile devices, the design of teacher education programme, teacher educators’ use of technology, and student teachers’ prior experiences, all impact on student teachers’ use of technology. Based on the data, building a community of learners, for social and professional reasons, appears to be the most important affordance of technology. Even though the student teachers have experienced using technology, they did not learn much about how to use it as a part of their pedagogy during this programme; the feeling is that technology should not substitute for the embodied pedagogies of the teacher educator. In conclusion, the study suggests that supporting early childhood education (ECE) student teachers to be proficient users of digital technologies in their professional practice is not straightforward nor linear. Rather, becoming pedagogically proficient is enabled by how technology is socially situated within, and distributed across, the social and professional contexts of the individual.