ICT Pedagogy: Teaching Teachers the Future

Young teachers need to possess deep knowledge and understanding of their subject area (content) as well as knowledge and skills about how to teach (pedagogy). When assisting pre-service teachers to build their pedagogical skills, teacher education programs at USC emphasise Lee Shulman’s (1986) theme of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK). Rather than addressing content and pedagogy discretely, PCK proposes synchronous selection and refinement of pedagogy and content; to maximize learning the teaching method must match the topic. The PCK model was developed further to address the enhanced teaching and learning opportunities and complexities that have emerged as a result of ready access to 21st Century technologies. To this end, a Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK - Mishra & Koehler, 2006) teaching framework forms the foundation of a USC curriculum initiative within the Discipline of Education. In Semester One 2011 extensive curriculum mapping was conducted within the USC Discipline of Education to identify how technology is addressed within existing teacher education courses. Research is also underway with the intention of developing and implementing a best-practice curriculum model that is ideally suited to the environment and resources available at USC. This initiative is supported by the Teaching Teachers for the Future (TTF) project. All 40 Australian Tertiary Institutions that provide teacher education programs are cooperatively involved in TTF. The common goal is that teacher graduates will arrive at schools ready and able to usefully integrate ICT to improve their classroom teaching. The community that has been created by the TTF project also provides a unique opportunity to coordinate research into teacher education programs on a national scale. TTF project officers Australia-wide are cooperatively facilitating two interpretive research projects to evaluate the curriculum initiatives being developed.