Abstract:

In recent decades, education has undergone extensive digital transformation. In Norway, the government’s digitalization strategy for education sets ambitious goals, promoting new forms of teaching and learning intended to enhance educational quality and student outcomes. Despite increased access to digital technologies in Norwegian schools, a substantial gap remains between the availability of technology in classrooms and teachers’ pedagogical use of these tools.

Drawing on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), this paper examines teachers’ understandings of subject-specific knowledge practices. The study is based on data from an online survey of sixty-six lower secondary school teachers in northern Norway (Mathematics: N = 42; Social Sciences: N = 24). Using the specialization dimension of LCT, the paper analyses and compares the organizational principles underlying teachers’ knowledge practices in mathematics and social sciences.

The findings indicate a code “clash” in mathematics and a code “match” in social sciences, which may help explain differences in patterns of ICT integration across the two subjects. These contrasting patterns—lower ICT use in mathematics, associated with a relativist code, and higher ICT integration in social sciences, associated with an elite code—suggest that subject-specific knowledge practices may align differently with the government’s digitalization strategy. To further explore these dynamics, the paper also presents illustrative findings from teacher focus groups within each subject area.

Overall, the study provides new perspectives on technology integration in education by demonstrating how variations in subject knowledge structures shape teachers’ knowledge practices. By foregrounding the role of knowledge and knowledge practices, the findings have implications for digitalization strategies and for the design of pedagogical approaches that support meaningful learning through the use of technology in education.

Keywords:

Technology integration, Legitimation Code Theory, specialization, knowledge practices, lower secondary school, subject areas.