ICT and education: a range of models to suit teachers’ notions of their praxis, or a case of one model fits all?

Abstract

AbstractTeachers’ praxis across different education sectors reflects a plethora of variables in terms of different subject bases, including pedagogic practice, practical skill, subject knowledge, professional ideas, philosophical values and so on. Most of these have an evolutionary element, teachers’ praxis being a function of professional and personal development, and often a reconciliation between a body of ‘professional teaching knowledge’, accepted as orthodoxy in many initial teacher training (ITT) courses, and the reality of teaching as an often mechanistic and instrumentalist profession on a day to day basis. Information and communications technology (ICT) presents a particular problem within this scenario, since its evolution as a subject and the culture surrounding it, is characterised variously by (depending on the sector), responses to a curriculum policy vacuum, action research and informal classroom theories, views of learning with ICT as relatively unsophisticated, reflecting among other things deployment of certain types of staff, pedagogic models developed by non-teaching researchers, and so on. This paper seeks to examine and compare the importance of these issues within two sectors, the primary and the post-compulsory, and in so doing, to challenge prevailing views about current classroom practice in ICT.