Abstract:

It is more and more consensual that the current school organizes pupils’ activities in ways that escape a vision of what learning should be in the social world. In order to contribute to redefine learning spaces for the future, the Project Future Teacher E-ducation Lab (FTELab) was setup assuming that technology enhanced teacher education programs may represent a relevant added value to the quality of prospective teachers’ training and therefore of their teaching practices. The project aims to find answers to the question: How does technology in learning spaces offer opportunities to provide innovative ways of designing teacher education for the future, and to provide research based resources for teacher education in the areas of Biology, Informatics, Mathematics and Physics. The project FTELab takes the idea that the future will blur the boundaries between living, learning and working and this will result in the creation of flexible multiuse spaces that can accommodate different activities and serve different learning purposes. It articulates the piloting of real experiments in initial teacher education courses with an analysis and development of a 3D 21st century teacher skills framework. The pilots that constitute the empirical field of the project will be carried within courses of the Master Programme on Teaching and developed in the context of specific courses of Initial Supervised Practice. The Project combines technology, creativity and teacher education design in order to create a challenging context for the development of ideas, guidelines and products that serve teachers’ preparation to become innovative practitioners.