DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-1461-0.ch010
ABSTRACT
As a partnership between a teacher education program and a public school, an introductory course in education was modernized to reflect the current technological and cultural contexts of the teaching profession. This was done to ensure the course would still be a transfer credit at other universities in the region and to ensure undergraduate students would receive a current perspective of teaching in Canada.
The result of this initiative was the development of an undergraduate course infused with modeling technology used in classrooms today designed upon an indigenous pedagogical model. In theory, this allowed the students to explore the interaction of technology-enabled learning and indigenous pedagogy.
In practice, this allowed the students to learn in a low-risk environment designed to reflect current reali- ties and advances in educational practices.
INTRODUCTION
This research was initiated as part of an investigation into mentoring in a technology rich classroom (Reid & Reid, 2015). The University implementation aspect of the research is what will be presented in greater detail here. The focus of this research project was to explore an implementation of pedagogi- cal approaches to teaching and learning to pre-service teachers that included technology infusion in an indigenous-structured undergraduate education course.
Indigenizing and
Mentoring Technology Usage in Undergraduate
Teacher Education
Doug Reid
Thompson Rivers University, Canada
Indigenizing and Mentoring Technology Usage in Undergraduate Teacher Education
Teacher preparation has attempted to keep up with current societal trends and the attrition rate of early career teachers (Greiner, & Smith, 2009; Mee, & Haverback, 2014) shows that more innovative practices need to be developed. In this research, introduction to responsive course design based on digi- tal technology integration, blended learning, and Indigenous pedagogical approaches within a teacher education program to attempt to address perceived limitations in recent education graduates to promote resilience and reduce early career teacher attrition.
Society and teaching environments have continued to change through the years. Early career educators find themselves in a wide variety of school environments have been identified throughout the literature and summarized numerous times (Buchanan, 2012). There are a number of environmental factors pre- sented in the literature that affect early career educators include the cultural & societal transition from pre-service teacher to early career educator, lack of support from the school district and the community, working conditions, and feelings of isolation. The literature also identifies factors that impact success for early career educators including institutional factors like the teacher evaluation process, administrative burdens, the predominance of teacher educators who have never or have barely been teachers themselves.
More individualized factors include their contract status, their inexperience in school settings, and the appropriateness of their teacher training (Forret, Fox-Turnbull, Granshaw, Harwood, Miller, O’Sullivan,
& Patterson, 2013). The need for mentorship of early career educators in appropriate pedagogy has been argued in the literature (Steinke & Putnam, 2011). The case study for this mentorship approach in a technology and indigenous pedagogy school environment identified factors in three categories including what the early career teachers were strong with, what they were not prepared for and what they identified as overwhelming in their first year of teaching (Reid & Reid, 2015). The identified factors were then integrated into the planning and delivery of a university teacher education program. This is the result of applying the identified factors in a teacher education program.
The final aspect of the larger research endeavour concerned bringing the experiences of the technol- ogy, cultural, and mentorship process to the university teacher education program. The research team was concerned for the high attrition rates that exist in the teaching profession especially in the first five years of a teachers’ career. It can be argued that it is important that pre-service teachers be able to experience the unknown and be provided with the opportunities to enable them to make informed decisions about teaching (Trinidad, Sharplin, Lock, Ledger, Boyd, & Terry, 2010). After the initial phase of the research concluded which coincided with the end of the school year, the lessons learned and factors identified were examined. This was done with a view to design a highly practical learning experience particularly focused on aspects of the teacher education program that needed to be present to help provide resilience and insight for early career educators to find success.
BACKGROUND
The entire research project took place in a K-12 school and a postsecondary institute in the same com- munity. The K-12 portion of the research was published previously (Reid & Reid, 2015). The university setting was an undergraduate teaching institution in a Canadian city. The author taught in an undergraduate general education course that was an introductory class that potential education majors could complete for transfer credit to a BEd program at other universities. It was a three-credit course that was based on a complete/incomplete experiential model that allowed students. The course had a long history at the institution and had been taught for well over a decade without major revisions. This course existed in
173 Indigenizing and Mentoring Technology Usage in Undergraduate Teacher Education
a Department of Psychology and a university transfer program that allowed students to do their initial education courses at one institution, then transfer to another institution to complete their education degree.
The physical learning environment at the institution was a basic university classroom with an overhead projector as the only technology beyond white boards and paper. The pre-service teachers were not initially encouraged to bring their own devices to class and use them to participate in class. A learning management system was not initially used to provide a repository for files or teaching, not for teaching in any sort of face-to-face or blended way. This initial offering of the class provided an interesting perspec- tive to the multiple iterations of the course using digital technology as an add-on and later as an integral part of the course design. This perspective allowed for the determination that technologically blended learning design to this course was needed and many initially face-to-face activities were moved out of the classroom and into other environments. It is in this context, informed by the mentoring experience in the K-12 classroom, that queries related to teaching practice enabled by technology use emerged.
The findings of the original research were integrated into an introduction to the profession of teaching class. This class was an introductory class that all education majors and education minors were required to complete. This course was designed on an experiential model where students engaged with the perceived realities of being a professional teacher in a K-12 classroom. The course had been taught for many years and the structure of the learning has not changed a great deal in all that time. For example, the textbooks for this course were initially published in the early 1990s and were still being published just for this course. The course content and design was used across a number of sections of the class so the findings of the K-6 school location were initially interposed into a solitary section of the class. Since the author originally taught only one section of the course, there was no freedom to make wholesale changes to the design of the course that would impact other professors teaching their versions of the course. How- ever, after one year, the department chair responsible for the course was so impressed by the feedback she received from others regarding the modifications that came out of the initial research study, that she approached the author and had him make wholesale redevelopments to every section of the course.
The author therefore redeveloped an aged introductory education course to ensure that our partner institutions would continue to accept the course as a transfer credit. It had been a long time since the course had undergone a major redevelopment and it was necessary to modernize the course for many reasons. It was decided that the course would be changing from a second year education course to a first year course. The course would also need to change from a pass/fail format to a graded course based on GPA similar to the majority of courses that offer results from A+ to F. There were two key components to the redevelopment, the use of technology, and the inclusion of indigenous pedagogies.
This research study had a number of people involved with it, including the primary author, one full time early career teacher, several peripheral early career teachers, several adjunct professors, and twelve classes of pre-service teachers. Each group will be presented below.
The author is a career educator with K-12 teaching experience and several graduate degrees from accredited universities. The author was based in a university and was responsible for the design, develop- ment and delivery of the K-6 research findings into the pre-service teacher education program. The other researcher was based in the K-6 school environment and was responsible for the mentoring components of the study. Both professionals spent time in both environments interacting with all the participants to some extent. The school based author spent time lecturing and instructing the pre-service teachers in the university class. The university-based author worked with the students and the teachers in the K-6 school as well. The early career teacher was a newly graduated teacher. The two adjunct professors were hired to teach the revised undergraduate course after the redevelopment of the course based on the research
Indigenizing and Mentoring Technology Usage in Undergraduate Teacher Education
feedback had taken place. Both adjunct professors had PhDs in education, and both had a great deal of experience in K-12, post secondary, and instructional design expertise. The pre-service teachers were all enrolled in an introductory undergraduate education course. The pre-service teachers were university students had varied including cultural backgrounds, economic backgrounds, and ethnic backgrounds and were coming into the program with a wide variety of life experiences.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
This chapter presents a case study of proven practice strategies and approaches designed to support early career teachers with not just surviving, but thriving in their chosen career. These practices are more than supplementary to their experiences in the education programs they recently graduated from. This case study will provide answers to the following questions:
(a) What successes and challenges are present for pre-service teachers in their undergraduate programs?
(b) How can digital technology modeling by college professors support pre-service teachers find suc- cess in 21st Century classrooms?
(c) How can pedagogical issues be addressed in teacher education programs to promote indigenous understandings in industrialized countries?
DESIGN OF THE RESEARCH
A key belief that drove this research was the basic objective to not fail in the teaching of the preservice teachers, to promote students success and to have the designed teaching be part of the preservice teacher success. These objectives guided the exploration that technology could play a valuable part of the pre- service teacher experience.
In previous offerings of this class, students had stated their beliefs regarding the reality of field experience versus the novelty of technology enabled learning. Students often highlight the novelty of technology use (Visser, Plomp, Amirault & Kuiper, 2002) and believe the use of technology is a design principle for the novelty effect rather than designing technology enabled learning activities. Many pre- service teachers made statements regarding the belief that technology improves learning opportunities but did not detail how this occurred (Li, 2007). These beliefs may befuddle educators and preservice teachers from asking fundamental questions that improve student success.
Technology use has often been seen as a cure to fix what ails education. In some circumstances technology is seen as being able to replace the older models of instruction (Zhao, 2007). Uninformed technology belief embraces the notion that sparkle breaks through the tedium of daily classroom rou- tines. It suggests an environment far removed from the stereotypical world of boredom, black and white answers, and repetitive routine through the creation of an environment for greater research possibilities.
Nevertheless, these uninformed technology beliefs conflicts with the literature that repeatedly argues that technology will not replace teachers but will assist students if used correctly (Collinson, 2001).
175 Indigenizing and Mentoring Technology Usage in Undergraduate Teacher Education
It can be understood why educators continue to embrace such a myth of uninformed technology use in education. Technology enabled learning in classrooms has been discussed in the academic literature for well over a century including when Teacher’s Aid published an argument entitled ‘Paper Versus Slate’
(The Education Circular, 1901). This article offered many reasons why paper and pencils were superior educational technologies compared to chalk and slate. This theme in the literature continues to this day including a comprehensive report (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2003) that maintained that all educators must be trained in the technical and pedagogical aspects of technology enabled learning and teaching. Other literature of that era argues that teacher education programs need to incorporate practical training and appropriate modeling of technology enabled learning across the cur- riculum (Sahin, 2003). This struggle against uninformed technology use in K-12 classrooms continues.
As part of technology enabled learning in teacher education, educators need to critically examine their modeling of teaching and learning experiences through the filter of their beliefs about and their usage of educational technologies (Zhao, 2007). It is questionable if reflection of individuals’ technol- ogy enabled learning professional practice is currently happening on a universal level in K-12 schools and teacher education atmospheres. If this reflection is not consistently happening, the development of pedagogies to improve technology enabled learning, including blended learning strategies infused with indigenous pedagogies may not have occurred yet either.
Changing preservice teacher views were paramount to the research. Many teachers are inclined to focus on integrating technology simply for transmission of knowledge rather than supporting higher level learning such as critical analysis or problem solving (Kayler & Sullivan, 2004). The literature (Ar- chambault and Crippen, 2007) argues that teachers and preservice teachers needed to extend their beliefs of instruction past simply increasing the amount of technology tools added to an educational offering.
In addition to examining the modeling of digital technology enabled learning, indigenous pedagogi- cal principles, and modernizing the content was the examination of the institutional structuring of the course offering to create an optimum learning environment for learners. These influences address the heart of what the research investigated. Creating an optimum learning environment for students to obtain the goals they wish to accomplish was vital to the design of the course. This matches with the goal of broadening of teachers views of the role of educators especially related to technology enabled learning in university classes and K-12 classes (Archambault & Crippen, 2007). The design of this research es- tablished that any design or technology innovations would be unable to meet the outcomes of a course unless they are tested in the context of identified learner-based objectives required for future endeavors.
It is the focus on learner-centered goals and pedagogies that are the basis of indigenous pedagogies and whether technology supports the outcome that is at the core of the course design process. One key design concern that was addressed involved ensuring that activities and technology use did not restrict students from engaging with the challenges of authentic learning required to build an ongoing process of being an active learner.
The research introduced a mentorship process in a K-6 classroom that was team taught by an expe- rienced teacher and an early career teacher. The lessons learned from the mentorship process were used to inform the teaching of pre-service teachers the following academic years. There were a number of initiatives that were implemented throughout the year and they are organized into three main categories:
Digital technology modeling, Indigenous pedagogy, and Conceptual perspectives. The research findings from phase one of the study were introduced as addons to an existing course and later formed the basis of a completely redeveloped class.