Abstract:

Teacher education programs are facing challenges to adequately prepare pre-service teachers for the effective use of digital media in their future practice by fostering their digital competence development. Thus, the Teacher Education goes Digital (TEgoDi) project aims to address this issue by developing and implementing a comprehensive approach across all teacher education courses to increase pre-service teachers' digital competencies. The objective of this research is to establish and iteratively refine an European-connectable and practical competence model that enables pre-service teachers to enhance their digital competencies with regard to usage in school.

A broad literature review identified several related frameworks focusing on teachers’ digital literacy skills and competencies: they vary in the description of competencies but almost coincide in their abstract structure. The TEgoDi model is based on a targeted selection of international reference frameworks—such as DigCompEdu (Redecker & Punie, 2017), TPACK (Mishra & Koehler, 2006), and the Austrian grid digi.kompP (Brandhofer et al., 2020)—that have been iteratively adapted and concretized to the specific context of German federal teacher education. In its core are professional action-oriented competencies of teachers, so the TEgoDi model links content knowledge and pedagogical (content) knowledge with media-didactic basics and media-pedagogical competencies.

The TEgoDi model will be developed and refined iteratively throughout the course of the three-year project by engaging lecturers of the entire university and experts to evaluate the content validity, as well as through field evaluation. Thereby, the model is used as a basis to foster a constructive dialogue with lecturers from different departments to conceptualize and elaborate particularly on the subject-specific dimensions of pre-service teachers’ digital competencies. Furthermore, to ensure acceptance by lecturers and enhance compatibility established teachers’ professional competence models, e.g. Baumert and Kunters’ (2013) generic structural model, are considered.

In its application the TEgoDi model forms the basis for the implementation of comprehensive support structures for students and lecturers—such as blended learning seminars, self-learning materials, tutoring, learning analytics as well as a maker space and media labs. In addition, TEgoDi will establish online-self- and performance-based assessments to guide and foster pre-service teachers’ digital competence development. The final paper will represent a detailed description of the TEgoDi model design as well as its key role in the overall approach. In this context we will also elaborate on the support structures and the self-learning environment for pre-service teachers.

Keywords:

Digital literacy, teacher education, competence development.