Preparing students for professional life in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous twenty-first century world has seen tertiary institutions eschew the traditional ‘lecture-tutorial’ model in favour of active learning approaches. However, implementing these approaches is not unproblematic. This paper explores how we navigated the tensions of cultivating twenty-first century skills in our students—first-year preservice teachers—through a purposely designed approach to active learning in an educational technology course. We illustrate how deploying Bakhtinian precepts through reflexive inquiry supported sensemaking of discomfort, leveraging this sensemaking to reinvigorate practice.
This inquiry explored preservice teachers (PSTs) developing learner and professional identities while participating in a university course that explicitly incorporates the use of technology into teaching. The paper posits that it is important for initial teacher education to explicitly engage with the role of technology in these developing identities to minimise the risk of digital inequity, both for PSTs’ learning and that of their future students. Two central questions are addressed: How did PSTs make sense of their identities as they took part in an educational technology course? And what challenges did they encounter in incorporating technology into their learning experiences? An exploratory case study of a group of tutors and participating students in an ongoing action research project directed at redesigned educational technology and innovation course at a higher education institution was undertaken for this inquiry. By critically interrogating students’ reflexive accounts and focus group discussions with academics teaching into the course, this inquiry has investigated and built emerging explanations in relation to identity and digital equity.
This article examines young people's sense of self and collective identity in relation to their use of specific digital tools available at their school. We use membership categorisation analysis (MCA) to explore how a group of young people produce a collective identity-in-interaction as captured in concrete relational speech acts. Fine-grained MCA analysis of group interview talk reveals participant students operating as a collectivity to accomplish a sense of shared identity in relation to the iPad. This focus on the ways in which young people's identities are intertwined with digital technology distinguishes this article from the technicist and operational perspectives that dominate the field of educational technology research and demonstrates MCA's potential for illuminating the relationship that young people have with technology. The article contributes to a growing body of research that engages with more nuanced ways of understanding contemporary, technology-mediated learning as a process of producing not only knowledge and skills, but also selfhood-both private and shared.
To have a positive impact on students’ development of crucial skills, blended university courses need careful planning to fruitfully integrate learning settings as well as methodologies. The authors adopted Design-Based Research to design a blended university course based on the Trialogical Learning Approach, and then to redesign it according to the learning outputs and the overall learner’s experience. The first iteration of the course (a.y. 2015) was followed by an observational study that aimed to identify student perceptions of (1) the impact of the course on the acquisition of the targeted knowledge–work skills and (2) strengths and areas for improvement to be considered when re-designing the subsequent edition. A total of 109 students participated in the two editions of the course under scrutiny in this research. The data corpus included students’ self-report questionnaires investigating the development of specific knowledge–work skills and focus group interviews that explored students’ perceptions. The data showed this blended course had a generally positive impact on students’ perception of acquisition of skills and knowledge, which increased between one edition and the next. This positive impact seemed to correspond with course refinements made by the teacher and with the activities that received greater attention in the second edition of the course.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.