TPCK and Initial Teacher Education: Insights on the Development Of Pedagogical Reasoning in TPCK-Based Instructional Design (ID) Practices

Abstract: In the last decades, TPCK (Mishra & Koehler, 2006; Angeli & Valanides, 2009) has come to the forefront of educational research, acknowledging the growing role of technologies in educational practices in the definition of teachers’ knowledge, with major consequences also in the field of teacher education. Moreover, teachers’ pedagogical reasoning (Loughran et al., 2016), along with tacit beliefs, is proving to be a powerful doorway to link (student) teachers’ pedagogical choices and technologies’ intended uses (Heitnik et al., 2016). This paper moves from these considerations to describe an ongoing research, aimed at investigating TPCK-related instructional design procedures (IDP - Messina, De Rossi et al., 2016) offered by three initial teacher education programs (Cyprus, Italy, The Netherlands), in relation to the development of student teachers’ pedagogical reasoning (STPR). Pre/post questionnaires, focused interviews, and observation protocols will be used to gather data while participants are engaged in TPCK-based ID tasks, in an explanatory sequential mixed method design. Expected findings will hopefully let see a connection between the use of TPCK-based IDP and STPR development. Finally, we will try to identify some communal structural elements among the different procedures, in the perspective of a future definition of an internationally shared IDP to support STPR development, to the service of policy makers and initial teacher educators.