Teacher educators’ experiences of digital technology: Initial findings from a phenomenographic study

The development and adoption of new digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, has the ability to support delivery of teacher education courses but also comes with risks (Trust, Whalen & Mouza, 2023). Supporting lecturers’ Professional Digital Competency is now regarded as an urgent task (Lindfors, Pettersson & Olofsson, 2021) but the Higher Education Research and Development community have been slow to publish research on digital technology use in higher education teaching (Marshall, Blaj-Ward, Dreamson, Nyanjom & Bertuol, 2024).
This research presentation reports on initial findings from a phenomenographic study of teacher educators’ conceptualisations of online teaching. Phenomenographic researchers argue that a phenomenon can be experienced in a range of qualitatively different ways (Marton, 1986) and aim to collect, collate and describe these (Taylor-Beswick & Hornung, 2024). Interviews were conducted with 11 teacher educators working in Higher Education Institutions, School Centred Initial Teacher Training, and Multi Academy Trust organisations in England. Data was analysed to identify categories of description, organised into matrices to reveal the structural and referential aspects of the phenomenon and presented in a visual diagram, or outcome space.
It was found that teacher educators conceptualise online teaching in a range of different ways that can be hierarchically arranged. In particular, they described the ways in which they felt digital technology narrowed their experiences of human interactions during teaching and observation of school practice and were concerned about perceived lack of engagement from students during synchronous online teaching sessions. However, some teacher educators felt empowered by emerging software, hardware and artificial intelligence and saw opportunities to support preparation for school practice and students’ own generation of knowledge about teaching. Notably, for areas where the limitations of technology were described, there were also alternative conceptualisations of the same structural component that described the possibilities presented by new digital technology. This could be an important point of reflection in contexts where perceptions of technology need challenging either at an individual or organisational level.
This research offers a critical lens on technology adoption in teacher education and provides evidence to inform strategies that move beyond emergency responses to Covid lockdowns and towards sustainable, innovative models of online teaching. These insights have practical implications for professional development and organisational change. By recognising the diversity of conceptualisations, leadership teams can design targeted continuing professional development to support lecturers in designing pedagogically robust online practices and harness the potential of emerging digital technologies for ITE delivery.