Session Information
10 SES 14 A, Transformations & Transitions in Teacher Education; Potentials and Contradictions
Symposium
Contribution
The final paper in the symposium explores the need to innovate digitally in teacher education to better support teacher-students during their school practicum and to assist their progress. UCD is a large, technically well-equipped university and our School of Education has a reputation nationally as a leader in the use of learning technologies and digitalisation in support of the full range of our education and teacher education programmes. For instance, UCD led on the pedagogical-technical aspects of the ITELab project 2017-19 – a one-of-a-kind ERASMUS+ Knowledge Alliance KeyAction – which centred on generating approaches, frameworks, and resources that inform pedagogically-informed ways to meaningfully integrate ICT within ITE courses. As such, we would have seen ourselves as well-versed on how to prepare new teachers to enter schools in which technology is an essential part of learning lives, and on how to use technologies in support of their own development. The second week of March 2020 shook that belief to its core. In the space of the following 20 days, all the School’s university-based learning events and activities transitioned to ‘at-distance’ (Joksimović, 2015). Similarly, all teacher-student placement support – methodology visits and supervisions, optional community and social projects, and portfolio activity – moved wholly online. This meant that all School staff involved in teacher-education lecturing, tutoring and placement were asked to depart from years if not a lifetimes’ practices and reframe their expertise as something markedly different and digitally-aligned. Over 150 individual teacher educators were involved. Many sources influences the direction of travel taken; eg the University’s hastily-assembled Teaching Continuity Hub, a twitter stream initiated within the UCD Teaching& Learning community, and perhaps most especially a co-created series of how-to /short-guides created and curated by our education technology colleagues. In parallel, our programmes and practices were ‘reprogrammed’. The imperative was “… to rethink models and innovate” (Bradley, 2019p.87). And to do so living within the principles and limitations of the ‘good-enough’ (Cronholm & Romare, 2018). This paper details and reflects on the UCD School of Education response as an exercise in resilience, pragmatic action, and values-led work from a teacher-learning perspective (Zhu et al, 2017). Drawing particularly on Rabadi-Raol (2019) to frame our engagement, we consider the compulsion, constraint, and duress experienced; but especially the mediation and consumption of technology-led solutions to pedagogical and psychosocial challenges. The paper brings together perspectives from programme direction, education technology support, and change-leadership
References
Bradley, A. (2019) Global banking regulation: Why and how; Session summary minutes. In: Papaconstantinou, G., & Pisani-Ferry, J. (2019). Global Governance: Demise or Transformation? Progress report on the Transformation of Global Governance project 2018-2019. Florence: EUI Cronholm, S., & Romare, S. (2018, October). Principles for Good Enough IT Service Management. In ECMLG 2018 14th European Conference on Management, Leadership and Governance (p. 37). Academic Conferences and publishing limited. Joksimović, S., Gašević, D., Loughin, T. M., Kovanović, V., & Hatala, M. (2015). Learning at distance: Effects of interaction traces on academic achievement. Computers & Education, 87, 204-217. Rabadi-Raol , A. (2019) Quality of teacher education and learning: theory and practice, Journal of Education for Teaching, 45:1, 115-117 Zhu, X., Goodwin, A. L., & Zhang, H. (Eds.). (2017). Quality of teacher education and learning: Theory and practice. Springer.
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