From digital competence to Professional Digital Competence

The authors of this article have collaborated as part of a steering group for Norwegian state-funded research and development project designed to enhance the professional digital competence (PDC) of both teacher educators, practising, and student teachers. In this article, we give voice to students’ experiences of their PDC development during teacher education (TE). We investigate their ideas on how TE might be developed to prepare them better for professional careers in a digital context. The participants are studying at a Norwegian university where, from 2018 to 2021, PDC has become a major area of focus as part of the aforementioned project. The data consist of four group interviews with 17 students from different campuses. We find that student teachers employ a broad range of digital technologies during TE. They experience a diversity of digital didactical practices and engage in thematic discussions concerning digitalization. They also utilise many technologies and apply the digital knowledge they have acquired in their personal lives. While some of them request more technical support during TE, most want to see TE engaging them in more critical discussions about the educational opportunities and challenges that digitalization offers. We discuss some of the dilemmas that TE must address to respond to these findings. In particular, we elaborate on how students’ digital experiences can be used as a resource when preparing for their professional roles as teachers.

Student teachers and their attitudes towards ICT

This paper explores the attitudes that student teachers in Malta, Norway, and Spain convey to digital technologies in formal educational settings as they start the 1st semester. A number of studies look at educational inclinations and employment of digital technologies (Granić & Marangunić, 2019; Ritter, 2017; Scherer & Teo, 2019). We have chosen to examine student teachers’ attitudes towards the professional use of digital technologies within a pedagogical framework. In this respect, a comparative qualitative analysis of one open-ended question that forms part of a more extensive questionnaire distributed to all participants is considered. The employed analytical lens subsequently centres on four concepts: ‘adaptability’, ‘creativity’, ‘critical thinking’, and ‘understanding of technology’. In this regard, our findings support arguments for asserting ‘attitude’ as a kind of teacher-specific digital competence for guiding their practice. We conclude by suggesting our analytical framework as a potential point of initiation for further development to understand attitudes as forming part of teachers’ specific digital competencies within teacher education and professional practice.

Awareness and knowledge of cyberethics: A comparative study of preservice teachers in Malta, Norway, and Spain

This paper explores the knowledge and understanding of cyberethics held by preservice teachers across three European countries. The study was conducted via an online survey and yielded a total of 1,131 responses from preservice teachers in Spain, Norway, and Malta. The facets of cyberethics included in this study were specifically related to behaving responsibly online, safeguarding privacy, respecting copyright, seeking consent of third parties before posting images or videos on social media platforms, and considering their own professional identity as future teachers when posting images or videos online. The findings indicate that preservice teachers reported similar levels of competence in both applying copyright and respecting privacy rules. However, this varied across countries, with preservice teachers in Malta and Norway reporting higher levels of knowledge and awareness than their counterparts in Spain. Malta had the largest number of participants who reported that they ‘always’ considered the potential impact that posting media online may have on their careers, followed by Norway. Spain had the largest number of preservice teachers who stated that they rarely or never thought about this impact on their teaching career. Our findings highlight the need for student teachers’ knowledge of cyberethics to be prioritised during ITE, especially within the framework of developing a professional digital identity. In light of our findings, we recommend that all ITE programmes include digital competence and cyberethics components in their curricula. This would enable preservice teachers to develop an emerging professional and digital identity to face the challenges of becoming teachers in the 21st century.

Introducing the PEAT model to frame professional digital competence in teacher education

This paper puts forward a case for using the PEAT model in teacher education, a framework designed to capture the different dimensions of teachers’ professional digital competence (PDC). The model arose from an Erasmus+ funded project exploring digital competence in teacher education. While existing frameworks and conceptualisations of teachers’ digital competence exist, this paper argues that the PEAT model has unique affordances and characteristics. This paper outlines the importance of digital competence before exploring how it is currently conceptualised in teacher education. Following this, some of the current frameworks encapsulating the elements of teachers’ professional digital competence are briefly presented. Finally, the paper presents the PEAT framework and discusses its unique affordances.

Pre-service Teachers' Digital Experiences through Digital Pedagogical Practices in Norway

Digital skills are one of the key competences outlined in The European Reference Framework of Key Competences for Lifelong Learning prescribed by the EU in 2006. Integration of digital tools and resources into the classroom results in more platforms for teaching and learning activities. Teacher training programmes prepare pre-service teachers with pedagogical competencies and skills necessary for their future practices. This paper shows that pre-service teachers could overcome the pedagogical challenges during COVID-19 teaching by updating their present and future classroom teaching strategies around digital literacy. To explore further how these new teaching circumstances are understood and reflected on by pre-service teachers, the researchers collected written reflections of 52 pre-service teachers in Norway using an open-ended survey about their digital integration experiences in their practicum. This paper offers analyses of the reflections inductively to reveal the teachers’ process of development of their classroom teaching strategies as influenced by new digitalisation-related experiences. The findings show low levels of digital integration according to the SAMR model but moderate to high levels of satisfaction among pre-service teachers of digital practices. In the light of these findings, this study offers pedagogical technological implications for teachers and teacher educators who work with teacher education curricula.

Digital Downsides in Teacher Education

This paper is particularly relevant in the context of a global pandemic when the majority of teaching is conducted online or in a hybrid environment that requires long hours in front of a screen. Online teaching is becoming increasingly important throughout education, and our findings draw attention to some of the challenges and possible pitfalls of the extensive use of digital technologies and, consequently, implications for teacher education. In the paper, we explore student teachers’ perceptions of digital downsides, their teaching tools self-efficacy, their resilience to digital distractions, and physical discomfort from the use of digital technology. We aim to identify these four concepts and examine whether and how they interconnect. A cross-sectional design was used to analyse data from 561 first-year student teachers enrolled in two teacher education programmes in two universities in Norway in 2019. The findings indicate that resilience to digital distractions decreases and a higher level of reported physical discomfort from digital technology increases student teachers’ perceived downsides of digital technologies. Overall, 38% of the variation in perceived digital downsides within the two teacher education programmes can be explained by these two concepts, as well as to the study programme the student teachers attended.

Digital competences in Nordic teacher education

We investigate how digital competences are being integrated into teacher education (TE) across the Nordic countries - Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland in this article. We make the case that there has been an expansion of the agenda for digital competences in education. Digital competences have developed from an information and communication technology perspective to also include a critical, social, and creative understanding of digital technologies and computing competences. Methodologically, we make use of doc-ument analyses, qualitative questionnaires, and interviews with participants in the field. With an emphasis on Danish TE, we explore how TE in the Nordic countries has responded to this agenda on policy and institutional levels. We suggest that the Danish approach to the expanded agenda can augment tendencies and challenges in Nordic responses to digitalisation in TE. A key finding is that Nordic countries respond to the expanded agenda in different ways regarding policy regulation, content areas, and how digital com-petences are organised and distributed on a local level. Tendencies and challenges identified across Nordic countries are valuable to ensure the continual development of teachers’ digital competences.

Digital Competence in Teacher Education Curricula

This qualitative study aims to contribute to the discourse on teacher educators’ knowledge by examining the impact of digitalisation. To explore how digital competence is addressed in local curricula and what is expected of teacher educators (TEDs) in terms of preparing student teachers for epistemic changes, I thematically analysed the programme descriptions, course descriptions, and plans for school practicum from six Norwegian teacher education institutions. The findings show that TEDs are expected to focus on the (pedagogical) use of digital tools. However, they are also supposed to teach student teachers how to foster pupils’ digital skills and digital responsibility while addressing digitalisation’s influences on society and culture, subjects’ contents, and educational practices. The findings imply that TEDs need an understanding of digitalisation’s implications for epistemic practices to foster student teachers’ digital competence and transformative digital agency.

Problematizing Scientization in International Organizations

Comparative education studies examined the roles multilateral organizations and non-governmental organizations play in global governance and international development. Emphasis has been given to their engagements both at policy and practice levels as well as their impacts. Generally, the mechanisms international organizations use to govern education and development seem qualitatively to change over time. The most recent emerging research trajectory explains how international organizations primarily use the power of scientific knowledge for organizational legitimacy, credibility, and impact. This is referred to in the literature as soft governance, epistemic governance, scientization, or scientific multilateralism, as it significantly relies on the authority of scientific knowledge as opposed to hard, financial preconditions, for global governance and development. Our understanding of scientization is still in its ‘infancy’, partly due to its relatively recent emergence and partly due to the use of varied indicators to assess it across organizational types. To contribute toward further theorization, this study problematizes scientization in international organizations, with a focus on multilateral, intergovernmental organizations. The study is organized around answering this overarching question: What are the conceptual and methodological attributes or features of scientization in international organizations? Using sociological theories and conceptions of policymaking and transfer, it discusses core substantive, methodological, and theoretical issues of scientization having relevance for further research.