Session Information
01 SES 02 C, Digital Tools and Competences
Paper Session
Contribution
The teaching profession is becoming increasingly digitized. The educational policies and curriculum address the technology-oriented changes. It is paramount that there is support for the digitalised citizen to ensure a democratic and accessible society. Teachers serve as the main facilitators of students learning. More precisely, teachers are expected to develop the necessary competences to teach in technology-mediated activities in order to support students’ digital competence (Starkey, 2020). Teachers’ professional digital competence (PDC) addresses the complexity that is specific to the teaching profession (Erstad et al, 2021; Skantz-Åberg et al., 2022) through the transitional role of technologies in shaping learning in a digitalized age (Danish et al., 2021). Therefore, the transformative character of technology positions teachers as agents in reshaping their emerging professional competence and calls for changes in the way in which teachers understand and articulate their changed profession and practice. However, teachers’ perspectives and reflections on their understanding of their changing classroom practices through their experience of technology-mediated teaching activities remain less focused (Reeves & Lin, 2020). Based on sociocultural approaches (Säljö, 2010; Wertsch, 1998) this study takes a particular analytical interest in teachers’ ability to look at their practice in professionally relevant ways, indicating signs of professional vision (Goodwin, 1994). The concept of professional vision involves discursive practices to see and understand central phenomena within a professional community (Goodwin, 1994), which in this study concerns aspects of PDC.
In this paper, preschool class teachers, working in pairs, in collaboration with a team of researchers participated in educational design-based research (McKenney & Reeves, 2014) in which teachers and researchers together discussed and reflect on the competences that come into play in technology-mediated teaching activities. The discussions were elicitated by video clips from the classroom activities. These discussions, which are also video documented, are named reflective discussions (Lantz-Andersson et al., 2022) understood as first-hand, situated, and collaborative deliberations in interactive situations.
The aim of this study is to explore how teachers elaborate on the competence that comes into play in technology-mediated classroom activities and what signs of professional vision are shown in the reflective discussions in terms of how we analytically understand their utterances as coding, highlighting and articulating (Goodwin, 1994) key aspects of competence that come into play in their teaching. The following question frame our interest: What signs of teacher professional vision in relation to a digitalized early years classroom can analytically be identified in the reflective discussions between teachers and researchers?
The concept of professional vision as introduced and described by Goodwin (1994) suggests that there are professional ways of seeing, understanding, and talking about things that are connected to the specific tools that professionals use within their professional community. We therefore use professional vision as a concept for scrutinising events in our study, where shared collective practices are discussed. In addition, professional vision provides a framework that brings together ways of seeing and examining individual skills “within a community of competent practitioners” (p. 626). In educational settings, focusing on how teachers learn to code and highlight remarkable events among the simultaneous events that occur during classroom activities is linked to the development of teachers’ professional vision. In this study, the elicited video clips are used as a starting point for teachers to comment on their practice with the researchers’ central questions and inputs supporting the organisation of “the perceptual field” (Goodwin, 1994, p.620). Therefore, teachers’ professional vision is informed and shaped by balancing the individual and collective skills that structure and organize a professional field of expertise through joint reflections.
Method
Underpinned by educational design-based research (McKenney & Reeves, 2019) the study involves nine teachers of early years education and a team of five researchers. The design involves video-documented technology-mediated teaching activities, followed by collaborative discussions, elicitated by videoclips from the classroom. The discussions are also video-documented and constitute the main data. The researchers selected video clips of instructional sequences involving so-called critical incidents that include some kind of tension, i.e., instances where the teachers encountered a challenge, such as instructional difficulties in explaining the technology-mediated tasks to the pupils, and situations when they experienced insufficient knowledge of the functioning of a digital tools. In that sense, such critical incidents that are shown in the video sometimes are immediately noticed by the teachers, or sometimes they become obvious and further elaborated on by the researchers’ questions and points. It is important to take into consideration the use of video in the reflective discussions and the role of the researchers’ questions, comments, and inputs. We use video to analyze teachers' practices as the video makes visible representations of their practices to them and others allowing a detailed examination and repetition of sequences of talk and embodied work practices performed in the actual settings of practice. Moreover, the collaborative video analysis approach could enable teachers to work together with the researchers to distinctly articulate and strive toward their professional vision.
Expected Outcomes
Preliminary findings suggest that signs of professional vision are shown by the teachers’ highlighting of technological and pedagogical issues. The highlighting is articulated and represented through speech and gestures related to the technology-mediated activities as displayed in the video clips. The use of gestures along with the talk allowed the teachers to highlight the problematic situation of lack of adequate technical skills. The close access to the teacher's own reflections and understandings, offered by the video, enabled a more detailed analysis, and made it possible to see the specific challenges of the technological shift. An analysis of selected excerpts showed that video-based discussions are treated as an invitation to develop teaching practices and offer teachers new insights and ways of teaching with digital technology. The reflective discussions increased the teachers' focus on noticing aspects of their teaching, which included fostering the notion of ‘learning together' which the teachers problematized (highlighted). However, teachers demonstrated an awareness of the social and institutional practices of their profession, which also included their duties and responsibilities as teachers, so that they are not completely unprepared for class. In addition, when teachers talked about their insufficient use of digital tools, they emphasized teaching strategies such as flexibility, previous pedagogical knowledge, and experiences as compensatory factors. Therefore, teachers’ PDC is understood as an evolving and complex set of skills that involves both technical and pedagogical competences.
References
Danish, J. A., Johnson, H., Nicholas, C., Francis, D. C., Hmelo-Silver, C. E., Rogers, M. P., ... & Enyedy, N. (2021). Situating video as context for teacher learning. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 30, 100542. Derry, S. J., Pea, R. D., Barron, B., Engle, R. A., Erickson, F., Goldman, R., ... & Sherin, B. L. (2010). Conducting video research in the learning sciences: Guidance on selection, analysis, technology, and ethics. The journal of the learning sciences, 19(1), 3-53. Erstad, O., Kjällander, S., & Järvelä, S. (2021). Facing the challenges of ’digital competence’: A Nordic agenda for curriculum development for the 21st century. Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, 16(2), 77. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1891-943x-2021-02-04 Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96, 606–633. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1994.96.3.02a00100. Jordan, B., & Henderson, A. (1995). Interaction analysis: Foundations and practice. The journal of the learning sciences, 4(1), 39-103. Lantz-Andersson, A., Skantz-Åberg, E., Roka, A., Lundin, M., & Williams, P. (2022). Teachers’ collaborative reflective discussions on technology-mediated teaching: Envisioned and enacted transformative agency. Learning Culture and Social Interaction, 35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2022.100645 McKenney, S., & Reeves, T. C. (2019). Conducting educational design research (2nd ed.). Routledge. Reeves, T. C., & Lin, L. (2020). The research we have is not the research we need. Educational Technology Research and Development, 68, 1991-2001. Starkey, L. (2020). A review of research exploring teacher preparation for the digital age. Cambridge Journal of Education, 50(1), 37-56. Säljö, R. (2010). Digital tools and challenges to institutional traditions of learning: technologies, social memory and the performative nature of learning. Journal of computer assisted learning, 26(1), 53-64. Tripp, T., & Rich, P. (2012). Using video to analyze one's own teaching. British Journal of Educational Technology, 43(4), 678-704. Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. Oxford university press.
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