Teaching and teacher education in the digital age

This project examines how early career teachers, who all graduated from the same preservice teacher preparation program, are able (or not) to enact critical technological decision-making in PK-12 teaching contexts. By interviewing participants from an earlier study who are now teachers, I will extend the former study’s longitudinal timeframe to span the transition from preservice teacher to professional (early career) teacher. My field needs more research that examines early career teachers in their early years of teaching to understand the support(s) and significant barrier(s) (dis)enabling these early-career teachers of critically employing digital technologies for content-area learning. Using detailed data from my prior study, along with newly collected interviews from the same participants, I will be able to connect how the knowledge, attitudes, and experiences developed during preservice preparation may be contributing to these early career teachers’ enactment of technology-supported teaching and learning within their particular PK-12 school settings. These school settings may be more or less supportive of technology integration, and thus, I will be particularly interested in the early career teachers’ risk-taking behaviors when they bump up against barriers/boundaries. Ph.D. students will also be working on this project and may provide some guidance, at times, to the undergraduate researcher.