Teachers and teacher educators learning from new literacies and new technologies

Abstract

While many teachers and teacher educators agree that it is important to integrate new literacies and technologies into their teaching, educators are often perplexed about how to begin thinking about this task. Research reveals that educators use technologies for personal and communicative purposes, but teachers, for the most part, have not yet applied these technologies in their classroom teaching and learning. Given these challenges, the current study was undertaken as an instance of teacher research carried out in the context of a teacher education course in new literacies and technologies wherein teacher educators attempted to take up new literacies practices. Study participants were pre- and in-service teachers. Findings indicate that teacher educators must foster environments to share problem-solving and distributed learning, to support design and multimodal redesign of texts, and to explore literacy and technology as transactional processes. Whereas both teachers and teacher educators may be tempted to wait until they are technologically adept before attempting to integrate new literacies and new technologies into their teaching, this study suggests that the learning environment, approach to learning, knowledge about multimodal text design, and stance toward literacy and technology may be far more important than the technologies that teachers use to enact their instructional plans.

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