The impact of COVID-19 has temporarily reshaped the delivery of lessons and possibly influenced the necessity for a teacher to equip technological knowledge. This emphasised the importance for teachers to possess not only content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, but also technological knowledge in a post-COVID era. Adding to existing literature that investigates Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge (TPACK) of pre-service teachers, the study aims to explore the process of pre-service teachers learning technological pedagogical content knowledge. Additionally, based in a 5-year Bachelor of Education programme (Chinese major), it intends to investigate the impact of Community of Practice (CoP) between senior years and lower years for TPACK.

Tondeur, Scherrer, Siddq, and Baran (2017) suggest teachers work with peers when they learn technology, and resonates Cohen (2003) that application of technology does not have a human component may result in students feeling isolated. Thus, our study aims to create a community with a collaborative environment (i.e. Community of Practice) where students can learn and share ideas virtually.

TPACK is defined as the knowledge of facilitating students’ learning of a specific subject content through using pedagogies and technologies (Koehler & MIshra 2009). It is one of the widely used frameworks that captures how teachers can effectively integrate technology into teaching. Having expanded from Shulman’s (1986) notion of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), TPACK is proposed to demonstrate how teachers understand the connections among technology, pedagogy, and content when designing and implementing digital instructions (Mishra & Koehler 2009).This framework acknowledges the importance of technological knowledge and describes teachers conducting classroom practices in an intricate and dynamic educational environment in this digital era.

Additionally, TPACK in language education is being paid attention to in these few years, where researchers like Tseng et al. 2020 reviewed TPACK specifically for language teaching and acknowledged its scarcity in the research field. Yatun et al. (2021) examines teachers’ TPACK in a blended-learning course adopting a qualitative descriptive research design. Results showed that TPACK helped teachers conduct effective teaching with technology during the blended learning activities. Most studies focused on in-service teachers, this study intends to fill the research gap in TPACK of pre-service teachers and provide insights for teacher education programmes. 

Moorhouse & Harfitt (2019) explored the professional learning of pre-service teachers teaching abroad with collaborations with in-service teachers at the host school. It was found that both groups of teachers were benefited through pedagogical exchange of ideas. Instead of in-service teachers, this study created a mentoring programme which offered an opportunity for the Year 5 pre-service teachers to transfer their identity as novice teachers to be a mentor of Year 3 pre-service teachers. They are qualified to be the mentors and are considered as ‘veterans’ in their university course community as they have completed the teaching practicum and acquired technological knowledge to complement with teaching during the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020. For Year 4 pre-service teachers who have just finished their field experiences in 2021, they shared similar learning experiences and are positioned as supervisors to monitor the whole mentoring process in this project. A Community of Practice (CoP) of TPACK is created for the Year 3 to Year 5 students in the programme. 

The research questions of the study are as follows:

1) How are the pre-service teachers at different levels benefited from the Community of Practice (CoP)?

2) What is the impact of a Community of Practice (CoP) in learning TPACK for teaching applications?

The Participants Purposive sampling was adopted to select the research participants in this study. The participants are Year 3 to Year 5 students from an institute of teacher education (ITE) in Hong Kong. They studied or currently studying a core course Teaching Methods at the time of data collection. The number of participants and their roles and responsibilities in the study as follows: Year 3 students: 81 pre-service teachers who are studying Teaching Methods Year 4 students: four pre-service teachers who developed a website to introduce nine online learning platforms, e.g. Kahoot!, Nearpod, Padlet, etc. Year 5 students: Seven pre-service teachers who were the mentor of Year 3 students to supervise their micro-teaching task in the course Teaching Methods. The Year 3 to Year 5 students who are at different stages of professional development formed a learning community. The Year 5 students who had practicum experience in both online and authentic classroom settings can share their first-hand teaching experience with Year 3 students. The Year 4 students who completed basic teaching methods training are about to have their first practicum experience. The Intervention The Year 3 students embarked on 12 weeks of lectures, with a micro-teaching in the last two weeks of the course. 81 students were divided into 16 group with five to six students in each group. The Year 5 student offered five mentoring sessions to the two groups of Year 3 students, including teaching the use of e-learning platforms (the website created by Year 4) and their applications. Data Collection The study adopted a qualitative study design using focus-group interview for the Year 3 and Year 4 students and semi-structured interviews for the Year 5 students. Four focus group interviews were conducted with around 26 Year 3 students, while one focus group for the Year 4 students. The former were asked about opinions on the mentoring program and e-learning and the latter was on creating the e-learning website and their experience chairing the mentoring sessions. And individual semi-structured interview that lasted around one hour was conducted with seven Year 5 students. They were asked about their role as a mentor and their opinion on the e-learning website and their experience with the mentees. All interviews were held on a video conferencing platform, Zoom. In total, more than 5 hours of recordings were collected and transcribed.

Due to limited space of the presentation, only the findings of Year 3 and Year 5 students are presented. The study found that, at the very beginning, the senior year students present worries to become a mentor where they doubted their position and TPACK can teach university students. However, the feeling of inadequacy empowered them to further enhanced their knowledge. They also constantly reflected on and recall their previous teaching experiences, such opportunities enabled them to learn how to improve themselves. Furthermore, providing feedback to the mentees' lesson plans on the use of technology, the mentors stated that ‘I see myself in them’ and advised them not to make the same mistake as they were inexperienced. All the mentors expressed that they situated themselves as a peer who is ‘one step further’ than the mentees, instead of a ‘teacher’. This relationship facilitates the exchange of ideas and largely benefits from the interactions in the process as mentioned by the mentees. Most importantly, not only the mentors were offering their experience and knowledge to the mentees, but the mentors have been inspired by the mentee’ work reciprocally. Unexpectedly, the mentors expressed that mentees’ creative ideas applying technological content knowledge widened their eyes on the project. The study concluded that both the mentors and mentee enhanced their knowledge in terms of TPACK. They are intrinsically and extrinsically motivated to deepen their TPACK and they highly recognised the mentoring programme. The study provides valuable insights into teacher education programmes for the development of professional competence and building a community of practice among different years of students.

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