THE WICKED PROBLEM OF INTEGRATING ICT: MORE THAN TEACHER KNOWLEDGE

ICT integration has been positioned as the holy grail of school transformation in education policies for over a decade, however, the extent and nature of ICT integration in school classrooms across the globe remains patchy. Early career teachers are often thought to hold the key to transformative ICT integration as they are held to be more knowledgeable about digital technologies than their older colleagues. However, it is perhaps not as straightforward. This paper reconceptualises the transformative integration of ICT by early career teachers as a ‘wicked’ problem – one that is messy and complex and for which there is no single, easy solution. In an ethnographic study, the ICT-based pedagogical practices of five graduate teachers in their first or second year of teaching were examined during one school year, to identify what factors influenced their pedagogical choices related to integrating ICT and the extent to which their practices were transformative. The study found that, rather than being agents of change and transformation, the graduate teachers largely reproduced the existing, mostly information transmission pedagogical practices of their more experienced colleagues. The study identifies three intertwined domains of factors – external, individual and socio-material domains – that mediate, but do not determine, the pedagogical choices made by early career teachers when integrating ICT. The study particularly identifies the strong influences of teacher beliefs about the practices of more experienced teachers and the influence of materiality on pedagogical choices made by early career teachers. The study calls into question reliance on teacher knowledge as the only solution to the complex and messy problem that ICT integration into schools exemplifies.