Self-study, technology and teacher education pedagogies - strange bedfellows?

The project that motivated this self-study emerged from the institution-wide initiatives at the University of Auckland to promote the use of mobile technologies in initial teacher education and also move from teaching small classes of around 30 students to the use of larger interactive or lecture theatre teaching spaces. Four experienced teacher educators questioned the impact that this might have on our pedagogical practices and were concerned about whether we would know what, and if, students were learning in these larger groups. We have explored how the technology might be used to enhance students' learning and our pedagogies. We used self-study to uncover our subjectivities in relation to performing as teachers, by sharing through creative writing, peer observations, and journals, our experiences of integrating mobile technologies into our teaching. With a strong belief that feedback about student learning provided a powerful means to inform our teaching (Hattie, 2009), we used mobile devices (tablets, smartphones, laptops) to generate feedback during our lectures/workshops in a range of teacher education programmes (Bachelor programmes of Early Childhood and Physical Education; Graduate Diplomas in Primary and Secondary Education) and across different subject specialisations (physical education, science, and languages). The opportunity to work as a self-study group was a way for us to collectively perform research as diffractive readings of our teaching as sets of practices, artefacts, knowledge, experiences and behaviours emerging from the dynamic interaction of people, objects, and places present in our teacher education settings. Self-study allowed us to examine shared feelings of frustration with logistics, infrastructure, and workload and of vulnerability and inadequacy with handling the technology. We found minimal obstacles to generating feedback with technologies, but were challenged with discerning and acting on this feedback. We concluded that teaching in the 21st century will almost definitely become increasingly dependent on technology yet expert teachers will always be defined by their expertise in the teaching role rather than technical prowess. Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. London, England: Routledge.