Abstract:

Teachers’ beliefs seem to be the most import factor for teachers’ educational practice in class (Windschitl et al. 2002). Especially the integration of digital media use in class is not only an actual demand upon teaching personnel (Ertmer 2012) but also a crucial condition of meeting the technical and medial challenges of the 21st century (Erstad 2016; Male 2014).

Current international research (Kontovourki et al. 2017), therefore, deals with the question of how teachers’ beliefs look (Admiraal et al. 2017) and how epistemic knowledge (Blömeke et al. 2014; Guerriero et al. 2017) can influence them as part of academic courses in pre-service teacher education. It seems to be likely that the amount of practical experience and media pedagogical theory are relevant. Internationally, education for teachers happens mostly after general studies in universities that offer different degree courses – in Germany, just one federal state still has specific universities of education (“Pädagogische Hochschulen”) only for teacher education. The question – concerning teacher education from an international perspective – is in how far these universities of education are more likely to influence students as upcoming teachers than universities with no specific focus on teacher education. The comparative study of this paper's authors asks for the media habitus (Biermann 2009; Kommer 2010, 2013) of pre-service teachers in one of each German university types (Technische Universität Dortmund/North Rhine-Westphalia and Ludwigsburg University of Education/Baden-Württemberg) at different points of their academic education. Ludwigsburg offers general media pedagogical education as well as a more detailed subject-didactical orientation than other universities.

For our study, we used a standardized questionnaire to collect data about the media habits and beliefs of 410 pre-service teachers in the first and last year of university education. The survey implied 19 groups of questions with an overall of almost 200 items. Results show that there is hardly any difference in the overall habitus and the beliefs of the students of both places. Surprisingly enough, this is not only true for the two different types of universities but also as a result comparing the different periods of their university studies (Tømte 2015). Health as a general value and the access to the Internet as a personal media habit seems to be unchangeable values as well as democracy and data security. Almost all beliefs as regards media and media education in school could not be changed as part of teacher education - neither by a theoretically oriented education at the Technical University nor at a more practically oriented and teacher-specific education at the University of Education. All coming-up teachers show a stable, somewhat conservative and security-oriented belief from the beginning up to the end of their university studies - no matter what education offered. Discussion asks for other modes of pre-selection of students to bring about a rebound in teachers media practice of the 21st century in school.

Keywords:

Digital media, teachers' beliefs, teacher education, media habitus, ITC skills, pre-service teacher education.