Landscaping on shifting ground: teacher education in a digitally transforming world

Abstract

For almost three decades, the landscape of teacher education has been modestly shaped by the exploration of practices that made use of what were, at the time, current instances of computing and communication technologies (CCTs). More broadly and importantly however, the deployment of CCTs globally has, over the same time period (1980-2008), supported a reshaping of the planet's social, economic and political circumstances in which all forms of education operate. Despite the enormity of these shifts the focus in teacher education has remained largely at site, reflecting a similar focus in schools. In fact, the patterns of adaption and response in teacher education to each new instance of high-tech product are now quite predictable. Thus, while teacher education's engagement with CCTs can be mapped as a kind of minor landscaping, a process which attends more to appearance than substance, it is landscaping effectively premised upon a stable geography, one that resembles that of thirty years ago. This paper explores the changed and changing geography of a world heavily shaped by the ongoing deployment and use of more and more powerful CCTs. The analysis suggests that if we continue to attend only to landscaping, teacher education will be at risk of being terraformed.