TPACK Course Participants Understandings About The Teachers' Role Using Pictures And Metaphors
Author(s):
Piret Luik (presenting / submitting) Liina Lepp (presenting) Sini Kontkanen
Conference:
ECER 2014
Network:
10. Teacher Education Research
Format:
Paper

Session Information

10 SES 06 B, Narrative and Visual Methods in Teacher Education Research

Paper Session

Time:
2014-09-03
15:30-17:00
Room:
B223 Sala de Aulas
Chair:
Shosh Leshem

Contribution

Teaching is a highly complex activity that draws on many kinds of knowledge. Teachers’ daily job has become more complex and demanding nowadays (Watt et al., 2012). Historically, knowledge bases of teacher education have focused on the content knowledge of the teacher (Shulman, 1986), then it has shifted more to pedagogy independent of subject matter (Ball & McDiarmid, 1990, cited in Mishra & Kohler, 2006). Teacher knowledge could be seen these days as two circles independent of each other. Shulman (1986) proposed to think about teacher knowledge as pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), which represents the blending of content and pedagogy. As the advent of digital technology has changed understanding about teaching and teachers’ knowledge Mishra and Kohler (2006) added technology  to content and pedagogy (TPACK) claiming that in teacher education the primary focus should be studying how the technology is used teaching content pedagogical way. This framework consists of seven parts and four of these parts indicate integration between the content, pedagogy and technology (Mishra & Kohler, 2006).

Within EU, there is more and more stress on improving quality of teaching and of education in different ways. Teachers’ skills to conduct research and skills how to teach their subject efficiently using technology are important parts of the nowadays’ teacher education programs. Therefore the European project Social Networks in Teacher Education (SoNetTe), which aim is to develop open courseware in teacher education through doing research together around the topic of the course has been created. One area of courses in this project are  courses about using technology in education.  The question arises, how these courses can influence student teachers understandings about teachers’ role.

In previous research studying such an abstract phenomena as teachers’ role, metaphors are often used. Metaphors provide a powerful mental model in understanding and explaining abstract or complex phenomena (Saban, Koçbeker, & Saban, 2006, cited in Saban, 2011). According to Sfard (as cited in Patchen & Crawford, 2011) metaphors are seen as the compasses of our consciousness - they have the potential to affect their users’ perceptions and actions. Recognizing that metaphors have the capacity to help uncover and mediate the relationship between thought and action, as well as provide the potential for changing both (see e.g Saban, 2010) in this study, we also use metaphors for understanding teacher’s role.

Objectives of this presentation is to describe student teachers understandings about the teachers’ role using pictures and metaphors; and possible changes of these understandings during the TPACK online course.

Research questions:

1. What metaphors and pictures student teachers use to describe teaching?

2. Which knowledge areas of TPACK framework emerge in explanations of metaphors?

3. What kind of differences emerge in these metaphors and explanations at the beginning and at the end of the TPACK course? 

Method

Sample: Fifteen student teachers (1 male and 14 female) from Estonia and Finland participated in this study. The participants were student teachers taking online course about TPACK framework, developed in SoNetTE project. The course was optional for all students and the course started in November 2013 and will end in March 2014. All the students were from master level, but their backgrounds were different: two of them were kindergarten teachers, two of them were students of career councellor and quidance, seven of them subject student teachers, two of them students of adult education and one primary school student teacher. The age of the participants was between 22 and 31. Instruments: As a part of their online course, participants were asked to add a picture, metaphor and explanation for the metaphor for the concept of "teaching" using the prompt: “Teaching is..… because…..”. The picture they used had to be drawn by themselves or taken a photo by themselves. These compositions were used as the basic data sources in the study. Procedure: The pictures and metaphors and the explanation followed were collected during a TPACK Framework online course. At the beginning of the course participants had to upload image with metaphor and explanation to the online course forum. Then they participated on the course discovering TPACK framework. The course lasted 18 weeks. As the last task of this course they have to upload again image with metaphor and the explanation to the online course forum. If the metaphor changed, they had to give reasons, why it might be happened. The participants’ permission to use the pictures for research purposes was obtained after the course. Data analysis: For analyzing metaphors, explanations and pictures, the data was analyzed using qualitative thematic data analysis techniques and deductive content analysis. The thematic analysis (Ryan & Bernard 2003) consisted of discovering themes and sub-themes. For deductive content analysis TPACK framework (Mishra & Kohler, 2006) was used. We gave explicit definitions, examples and coding rules for each deductive category, determining exactly under what circumstances a text passage can be coded with a category and then the category definitions were putted together with coding agenda (Mayring, 2000). Three authors undertook parallel coding to ensure consistency in the interpretations. If there was a disagreement about themes identified, coding or categorization, we went back to the original data and discussed it until a consensus was reached.

Expected Outcomes

Different categories of metaphors at the beginning of the course revealed. Most of the teachers described teaching as an process. Some of these processes had ending goal (e.g. building a house) and some of these were everlasting processes (e.g riding on a bicycle). Partnership (e.g. road we invite students to travel with us) and individuality (e.g. getting lost and then find the way home again) themes were identified in metaphors as well. Only few participants described teaching as a some kind of object (e.g. photocamera). In the analysis of different knowledge areas of TPACK framework, mainly parts describing content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge were covered. Only one student teacher mentioned technology in their explanation of metaphor. It seems that in the beginning of the course student teachers did not connect technology often as a natural part of description of teaching even though it is nowadays used everywhere. Analysis of the metaphors collected in the end of the course will conduct in March. We expect that at the end of the course there could be some changes both in metaphors and in explanations. In presentation about these results and changes will be discussed as well. According to the results of the study some recommendations could be given improving the teacher education curricula and elaborating international courses.

References

Mayring, P. (2000). Qualitative content analysis. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 1(2). http://217.160.35.246/fqs-texte/2-00/2-00mayring-e.pdf. Mishra, P., & Kohler, M. J. (2006). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017–1054. Patchen, T. & Crawford, T. (2011).From Gardeners to Tour Guides: The Epistemological Struggle Revealed in Teacher-Generated Metaphors of Teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 62(3), 286-298. Ryan, G. W. & Bernard, H. R. (2003). Techniques to identify themes. Field Methods, 15(1), 85-109. Saban, A. (2010). Prospective teachers’ metaphorical conceptualizations of learner. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26, 290-305. Saban, A. (2011). Prospective Computer Teachers’ Mental Images about the Concepts of “School” and “Computer Teacher”. Educational Sciences: Theory & Practice, 11(1), 435-446. Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14. Watt H. M. G., Richardson, P. W., Klusmann, U., Kunter, M., Beyer, B., Trautwein, U., & Baumert, J. (2012). Motivations for choosing teaching as a career: An international comparison using the FIT-Choice scale. Teaching and Teacher Education, 28, 791-805.

Author Information

Piret Luik (presenting / submitting)
University of Tartu, Estonia
Liina Lepp (presenting)
University of Tartu, Estonia
Sini Kontkanen
University of Eastern Finland

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