| dc.description.abstract | In many countries around the world there have been initiatives to promote the use of
information and communication technologies (ICT) in schools, both as a goal in its own right
and as a means to enhance the pedagogies in the classroom. A core issue in these initiatives
has been the development of teachers´ competencies in using ICT. In Sweden, there have
been a number of initiatives that include in-service training of teachers. Most of these have
been focusing the “theoretical and practical” training of teachers outside schools, typically
organized as courses for individual teachers. One exception is the most recent Swedish
National Action Program, ITiS (Information Technology in Schools), aimed at pedagogicallyoriented
in-service training for teachers in teams. Individual teachers in the teams receive a
personal computer, they are to carry through a student project using ICT, and they meet with
a facilitator (15 hours) and other teacher teams in seminars (20 hours), all in order to support
pedagogical development.
The overall aim of this research is to enhance the understanding of how a teacher team
functions as a vehicle for the development of competencies in pedagogical use of ICT. More
specific research questions are asked about what characterizes the teacher team how do the
team and the teachers in the team use the resources offered by the ITiS program as well as
other resources in their environment; what issues and concerns about the pedagogical use of
ICT, do the teachers raise; and what are significant dimensions and content in their learning?
In addition, there is a perspective at drawing conclusions for design of teacher competency
development and in-service training, in particular of learning how to use ICT and developing
pedagogical awareness of such use.
Etienne Wenger´s theory of Communities of Practice (CoP) provides a framework. This
theory takes as a basic premise that learning should be understood as changing participation
in changing social practice. The theory argues that in a CoP, participants have a mutual
engagement for a negotiated joint enterprise and over time, they develop a shared repertoire.
In the empirical study in this work, a case-study approach has been used. A teacher team
consisting of eight teachers, one woman and seven men, teaching grades 6-9, have been
followed during a period of ten months. The case is chosen from a number of teams studied.
The methodology is mainly ethnographic and data has been collected through observations,
informal conversations, documents, and focus group conversation.
An overall result is that the team is a community of practice on all accounts, where the
teachers are accountable to each other and to their joint enterprise. Important resources in
fulfilling this joint enterprise are the members of the team; the facilitators; other teams; and
the technology in itself. As a resource, ICT becomes a catalyst for pedagogical discussions. It
is noteworthy that ICT is secondary to the pedagogical agenda where teachers raise many
different issues, for example infrastructure, instructional models and design, and students’
learning and development. When it comes to the teacher’s learning processes, they expressed
different epistemologies with respect to learning how to use ICT, where they want someone
to tell them exactly what to do, and learning about pedagogy. In the latter case they do not
want someone else to set the agenda.
The conclusion from this study for in-service training is that, ITiS is a working model for
school development concerning ICT. The organization in teacher teams as a basis for the work
is highly functional and the inclusion of facilitators to scaffold the learning processes is
important, besides offering the technological infrastructure with private access to computers. | en |
