Situating ICT in early childhood teacher education
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Situating ICT in early childhood teacher education Davoud Masoumi 1 Received: 14 September 2020 / Accepted: 23 November 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Preparing the next generation of preschool teachers who can integrate and make use of ICT to capitalise on and develop young children’s digital competences remains a challenging goal for teacher education programmes (TEP). Given the current gaps in the literature, this study aims to expand and deepen our understanding of the extent to which early childhood pre-service teachers encounter ICT during their training and how they are prepared to use digital technologies in their future practices. The empirical data was generated through a focus group study with pre-service teachers and interview with their teacher educators at an institution of higher education in Sweden. The findings of the study suggest that pre-service teachers feel they have not been adequately prepared to integrate ICT into their future educational practices in preschool. Teacher educators, however, demonstrated a completely different perspective, highlighting a variety of initiatives that they were implementing to prepare the next generation of preschool teachers to use digital technologies. It will discuss why pre-service teachers, unlike teacher educators, feel they are not being adequately prepared to use digital technologies in early childhood education. The study also provides a detailed account of the varied procedures involved in preparing pre-service teachers’ digital competences and makes recommendations to teacher educators on how to enhance future preschool teachers’ TPACK. Keywords Pre-service teachers . Teacher educators . ICT integration . Digital competence . Early childhood education . Teacher education programme
1 Introduction Information and communication technologies (ICT) have been widely introduced as agents of change in educational practices. The ability to use and embed ICT as an integral component in educational practices is increasingly considered an important
* Davoud Masoumi [email protected]
1
University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden
Education and Information Technologies
qualification for preschool teachers and preschools. However, the introduction of such technology does not seem to have transformed educational practices in preschools and schools as originally expected (Brown et al. 2016; Cuban 2018; Player-Koro 2013). The consistent finding of a growing number of studies suggests that teachers’ beliefs, knowledge and digital skills, as well as the obstacles they perceive to the implementation of such technology, plays a key role in defining the ways teachers integrate digital technologies into early childhood education (cf. Blackwell et al. 2013; Masoumi 2015; Nikolopoulou and Gialamas 2015) and serves as the primary source for teacher’s digital skills in teacher education. It is assumed that an appropriate use of ICT in TEP will contribute to the teaching and learning process and develop pre-service teachers’ digital competences for their own professional growth. D
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