Aim
The aim is to explore what constitutes quality in teaching in relation to digitalisation of education, through bringing together researchers, professional teachers and students in collaborative video based, longitudinal investigations of contemporary teaching in digitally rich classrooms in the Nordic countries.
Design
The project is designed as a three-year longitudinal study, where the same teachers and students are followed with video recordings from each school year. The video recordings are made with multiple cameras, focusing on both the teachers’ instructions and the students’ activities on computers and other digital resources. From the recordings, examples from the teaching are selected in relation to an analytic framework based on previous research in digitalisation of Nordic classrooms. The selected clips are discussed in focus groups with teachers as well as students with a focus on the consequence of digitalsation for teaching quality.
This project is part of Theme 1 ‘Studying Teaching Quality’ within QUINT.
Findings as of now
At present, CCN’s theoretical work is directed at conceptualizing how to understand relations between digitalization and teaching quality from a media ecology perspective. Our analyses so far indicate that digitalization changes the classroom as a space for teaching and learning in multi-facetted ways. Some preliminary findings in focus for further analysis:
- Organization of teaching moves towards learning platforms, which changes participation frameworks for teacher-student interaction. Instructions tend to be more in written text, and terms for formative feed-back during work changes. Teachers also point at how they have to develop new teaching practices in relation to shared visual focus in the physical classroom versus students’ screens.
- Classroom literacy practices become connected and move “under the teachers’ radar”. This means increased access to, and use of, a multitude of texts and information, which can give room for students’ agency and engagement. From the teacher perspective this raises new demands on how to supervise and scaffold students' work as it becomes more and more diverse and difficult to see.
- We see elements of gamification and more interactive learning material in some subjects, but not all. These elements are characterized by intense engagement from the students’ perspective, but does not always lead to more challenging tasks or higher quality in how content is represented.
- Subjects are represented in different ways when using digital resources. Analyses of researcher - subject teachers’ discussions show how different norms for students’ and teachers’ participation in the classroom are challenged and renegotiated in relation to the conditions of digitalisation, and how the introduction of new technologies proves to take up a lot of space in school work.