Abstract:

In the wake of the diverse experiences from digital teaching during the Corona Pandemic (Ferding, Baumgartner, Hartshorne, et al. 2020; Durak & Çankaya 2020a; Durak & Çankaya 2020b; Obermeier, Gläser-Zikuda, Bedenlier, et al. 2021), teacher education at universities internationally is facing reform processes: How much digitality should be preserved? How has the awareness among pre-service teachers of their digital competencies and needs changed during the period of digital study? (Horajova, Kallarova, Huraj 2022; Raccanello, Balbontín-Alvarado, da Silva Bezerra, et.al. 2022; Aleksander Aristovnik, Damijana Keržič, Dejan Ravšelj et al. 2021). Which new contents and structures should be established with regard to the development during the previous pandemic-terms, and what do students want?

In a project funded by third parties, a demand-oriented course offerings is to be developed as "Curriculum 4.0" for the teacher training programs English/American Studies and German Studies, which has started with a survey among students. Before the pandemic, pre-service teachers in Germany were considered to be less open to the potential of digital teaching than students in other subjects (Schmid et al. 2016). We first wanted to check if and how this assessment has changed until today.
With semi-standardized questionnaires, all student teachers of both disciplines (German and English/American Studies) and their lecturers were addressed via different distribution channels at the beginning of the summer term of 2022.

The response shows that the students still predominantly evaluate media competence as technical competence and only show increased interest in that specific aspect. Theoretical, ethical, and societal aspects of digital media or metacognitive reflections on one's media use are assessed as significantly less relevant and in demand.

When analyzing the data, however, it is not enough to look at the mean values in the surveys: High standard deviations point to a student body that is still divided regarding its own media habitus even after the pandemic (Kommer & Biermann 2012; Delere & Rath 2018).

This paper presents the project and selected survey results. These then serve as a basis for the development of a differentiated, modularized offer that intertwines three aspects:
1. media pedagogically challenging exercises in digital teaching/learning settings.
2. close orientation and reflection of media pedagogical actions on current research results as well as national and international competence frameworks for educational contexts
3. high peer-to-peer work.

We discuss the possibility for teacher education to reduce domain-specific digital media skepticism through performance incentives (creation of OERs, certificates) and peer experience (Raccanello, Balbontín-Alvarado, da Silva Bezerra, et al. 2022; Krohn 2021). Furthermore, we try to bring theory interest into focus by providing students with increased application confidence in digital work and by promoting the curricular binding of digital media education courses in the context of the subject didactics German and English.

Keywords:

Digital literacy, pre-service teacher's perspective, curriculum design, post-pandemic teaching.