The researchers had been project leaders for R&D projects focusing on the promotion of professional digital competence in teacher education at their respective institutions. The survey originated as a project initiative to investigate how teacher educators across the five teacher education institutions (HiØ, HVo, NTNU, UiA, USN) engaged in and promoted student teachers’ PDC.
Digital emergency teaching during COVID-19 lockdown: Teacher educators' development of professional digital competence
The article first published, Digital emergency teaching during COVID-19 lockdown: Teacher educators' development of professional digital competence (Røkenes et al., 2023), explores teacher educators’ development of PDC in the light of the covid pandemic and collaboration with students and is based on the qualitative answers from the survey question: Due to the covid pandemic, many educational institutions have had to conduct teaching digitally at times. How have various experiences with digital teaching and interaction with students affected your own professional digital competence? The findings show that first, the teacher educators have a lower threshold to use digital tools in their teaching, feel more comfortable in using them and are familiar with more tools than before the covid pandemic. Second, the teacher educators also expressed that online teaching during the pandemic also sparked their didactical reflections. They are more aware of advantages and disadvantages of teaching with digital tools. Last, the teacher educators emphasised that online teaching made them realise how important relations are for quality teaching and that only teaching is not enough for building the relations necessary to educate teachers.
Thus, the covid pandemic triggered teacher educators’ use of and didactical reflections around the use digital tools for teaching. However, the teacher educators’ answers also showed that the covid pandemic contributed to their PDC development mainly in the areas of teaching with digital tools, although not so much in areas connected to ethics and epistemic questions, awareness of digitalisation’s influences on subjects, roles, society or learning.
Teacher preparation for the digital age: Is it still an instrumental endeavour?
The next article, Teacher preparation for the digital age: Is it still an instrumental endeavour? (Aagaard et al., 2024), as the title implies, dives deeper into exactly the question of what teacher educators focus on when promoting student teachers’ PDC. The authors introduce the concept of “epistemic dimensions” of PDC – the ones that “go beyond” the instrumental skills of using digital technologies for teaching or learning purposes and instead imply reflections on epistemic questions in a digital context such as (1) What is the nature of knowledge in this context? (2) How and through what means do people in this context develop knowledge? (3) Where is knowledge located? (4) What are the limits of our knowledge today?” (Aagaard et al., 2024, p.4). The article is based on the part of the survey’s quantitative questions that focuses on what teacher educators do in their teaching to promote students’ PDC. The statements, such as “In my teaching, I facilitate student teachers’ learning about guidelines for personal data protection” that the informants rated on a four-point Likert scale (“Not at all”, “To a little extent”, “To some extent”, “To a large extent”) were categorised into instrumental and epistemic. Then, the researchers analysed to what degree the teacher educators addressed instrumental and epistemic dimensions in their teaching.
The research shows that teacher educators are equipping students with skills in personal data protection, copyright law, source evaluation, and digital collaboration, while also teaching them to use digital tools for supervising and enhancing learning processes, assessments, and creating digital resources. The focus is on the versatile instrumental uses of digital technology and promoting a culture of sharing among student teachers. However, there is less emphasis on epistemic issues such as teaching digital responsibility, addressing digital bullying, understanding the impact of digital communication on relationships, managing one-to-one device classrooms, and curbing irrelevant digital activities during school hours. Overall, it became obvious that the instrumental dimensions of PDC prevail – with one exception: The teacher educators facilitate the “Developing a sharing culture”. The authors conclude with a discussion focusing on the importance of paying more attention to the epistemic dimensions of PDC fostering transformative digital agency.
Profiling teacher educators’ strategies for professional digital competence development
The third article, Profiling teacher educators’ strategies for professional digital competence development (Pedersen et al. 2024), is also based on the quantitative data from the survey. It focuses on what profiles exist among teacher educators regarding their strategies for developing their competence in using digital resources in teacher education and aspects related to these profiles. The authors found three profiles: 1) Restrictive users of digital competence development (DCD) strategies 2) Moderate users of DCD strategies and 3) Extensive users of DCD strategies that made different use of the following five strategies: self-study, collaboration with peers, involving students, gaining expert support, and external collaboration.
Restrictive users of DCD strategies utilize a limited set of strategies infrequently, favoring collaboration with a select group of peers and self-study. Moderate users regularly implement DCD strategies and also prefer working closely with peers and engaging in self-study, showing a greater tendency than restrictive users to seek expert advice. In contrast, extensive users frequently employ a wide array of DCD strategies and engage in broad collaboration, including with peers, students, and more extensively with external partners and experts. Based on the findings the reseachers suggest a model displaying steps to expertise and recommend that DCD in teacher education could be organised as a sequence of strategies where collaboration is the core, since it is the primary strategy of all.
Together the three articles can be seen as a little portfolio of digital competence in teacher edcuation in Norway. They show what the status is and show a way forward.
Read more:
Røkenes, F.M.; Andreasen, J.K.; Aagaard, T.; Nagel, I.; Amdam, S.H. & Pedersen, C. (2023). Digital nødundervisning under covid-19-nedstengning: Lærerutdanneres utvikling av profesjonsfaglig digital kompetanse. Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy. ISSN 1891-943X. 18(4), s. 234–245. https://doi.org/10.18261/njdl.18.4.3
Aagaard, T., Amdam, S. H., Nagel, I., Vika, K. S., Andreasen, J. K., Pedersen, C., & Røkenes, F. M. (2024). Teacher preparation for the digital age: Is it still an instrumental endeavor? Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2024.2330927
Pedersen, C.; Aagaard, T.; Daus, S.; Nagel, I.; Amdam, S. H.; Vika, K. S.; Røkenes, F.M.; Andreasen, J.K. (2024). Profiling teacher educators’ strategies for professional digital competence development. Teachers and Teaching Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2024.2336612