Abstract:

The teaching and learning processes require the reconstruction of a teaching professionality in a dynamic, continuous and complex way that depends on critical reflection processes (Loughran, 2019). As such, the literature on the teaching and learning processes and the construction of teaching professionality reveal professional knowledge which is multifaceted and includes a) content knowledge, b) didactic and pedagogical knowledge of this content, c) sociology, philosophy and history underlying the curriculum (Nóvoa, 2017). This knowledge is, on the one hand, the result of higher-level and specialized training, but it should also derive from an investigative, cultural and contextual update (Loughran & Menter, 2019; Cochran-Smith, 2004).

Both the quality of the teaching and learning processes, as well as the pedagogical training of Higher Education teachers, are topics that have been on the agenda. The literature itself (Marques & Pinto, 2012; Xavier & Leite, 2019; Ferreira, 2016) reveals a need to encourage practices that focus on a hybridization of learning. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic forced teachers to rethink the teaching and learning processes, having exposed several issues that raised the questioning of practices and strategies, namely: a) lack of student interest, b) the inability to study autonomously, c) limited social interactions and, still, d) little immersion in learning contents. In this context, teachers, including teacher trainers, were forced to try to update themselves in terms of their digital skills, in order to be able to keep up with the current generation of learners, by integrating computers or mobile devices in the context of teaching and learning, elements that are part of students' daily lives.

Bearing all this in mind, the aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to present the project "Pre-service teachers’ technology experiences in teacher education programs: A Community of Practice perspective”, whose main objective is to understand how teachers-to-be have been experiencing technology in their teacher education programs and what they say about the helpful aspect of this usage to their future school practices; on the other hand, we would like to present the early findings of this study which are concerned with the teacher trainers who are developing and delivering courses for the future teachers. Therefore, by following a quantitative analysis approach, we have created and implemented a survey inspired in different types of already validated frameworks and questionnaires, namely Digital Competence Framework for Educators (Redecker, 2017), Marco de competencias docentes en materia de TIC UNESCO (Butcher, 2019), ISTE Standards for Educators: A Guide for Teachers and Other Professionals (Crompton, 2017), among others. In this survey participated teachers of five different Master’s degrees in Primary Teaching in a public Higher Education Institution in Oporto, Portugal, who are responsible for the different courses in these programmes.

The main results show that, although teachers have shown a big effort on improving their digital skills, these are still quite incipient and at a basic level. We believe that the fact that the teaching professions face rapidly changing demands, teacher trainees need to adapt themselves in order to be able to train their own students, future teachers, for a profession which requires an increasingly broad and more sophisticated set of competences than ever before.

Keywords:

Teacher trainers, professional development skills, digital skills for teaching, digital competences framework.