Learning to Teach in a Remote School Context: Exploring the Organisation of Teachers’ Professional Development of Digital Competence Through Networked Learning

This chapter takes a school management perspective and investigates an upper secondary remote school in northern Sweden and its ambitions to create conditions for teachers’ professional development (TPD) of digital competence. More specifically, the chapter explores possibilities and challenges in how TPD of digital competence can be organised, facilitated, and sustained. By means of Cultural–Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), the results and analysis show that the development of teachers’ digital competence requires a school management that is supportive in creating a culture of change that can be sustained beyond single TPD actions and activities. Moreover, teachers need support to elaborate and negotiate on what type of tools, rules, roles, and divisions need to be added to the activity for the networked learning to take place and to proceed both in a short-term and long-term perspective. It is also shown how the school management needs to be sensitive to when and how the learning network is in need of encouragement and external support, that is, the importance of finding a balance between when the learning network can be self-organised and when it is in need of being externally directed with support from the school management.