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?