Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemGraduate teachers and ICT: the prospect of transformative integration( 2013)This study is concerned with the enactment at the school level of policies that promote the transformation of learning and teaching through the integration of information and communications technologies (ICT) into schools. The study has a particular focus on how graduate teachers, drawn from a highly digital generation, enact their practices. In an ethnographic study, the ICT-based pedagogical practices of five graduate teachers in their first or second year of teaching were examined during one school year, to identify what factors influenced their pedagogical choices related to integrating ICT and the extent to which their practices were transformative. The study was set in a school ‘in the middle’ - an Australian metropolitan secondary school that was neither technology-rich nor technology-poor, that scored good, but not outstanding academic results, and that did not experience any particular measure of disadvantage. This study reconceptualises the integration of ICT by graduate teachers as a ‘wicked’ problem – one that is messy and complex and for which there is no single, easy solution. The study identifies three intertwined domains of factors – external, individual and socio-material domains – that mediate the pedagogical choices made by teachers when integrating ICT. Within the individual domain, the study shows that teachers’ beliefs and dispositions towards ICT integration are influenced by their folk pedagogies or experiences as learners themselves; the pedagogies they were explicitly taught in their teacher preparation; the signature pedagogies and culture of the disciplines into which they teach; and the built pedagogy, the physical spaces in which they teach. A socio-material perspective is shown to be essential when integrating ICT into school classrooms. The practices of the more experienced teachers have a significant influence on the pedagogical choices made by the graduate teachers, particularly when teaching out-of-field, and reveal a tendency towards reproduction rather than transformation of practice. However, the material world of the school and the local translation of policies, the little things, also have a significant influence on the pedagogical choices made by graduate teachers when integrating ICT. With so many factors shaping graduate teachers’ practices, the study discusses the prospects for transformative integration of ICT by graduate teachers, revealing that, although the socio-material world of the school tends towards reproduction rather than transformation of practice, graduate teachers exert agency in their pedagogical choices. The study identified three categories of agency among the study participants – those who deliberately adopted the dominant practices of their more experienced colleagues, those who reluctantly adopted such practices, and those who actively resisted the dominant practices. A fourth category is also suggested – the active transformer.