Introduction to the Guest Edited Issue: Teacher Education in the Online Environment

Online education – whether in the P-12 or teacher education context – necessitates the routine and judicious use of educational technology. Researchers in the field of educational technology caution us to not just focus on the technological tools, but to carefully consider how these tools are used to support learning goals. Building on Shulman’s (1987) work in Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), Mishra and Koehler (2006) argue that intentional, thoughtful teaching with technology is a complex additional form of knowledge they call “Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge” (TPACK). In this special issue, we seek to build knowledge in TPACK from the perspective of teacher educators providing online education to pre- and in-service teacher candidates. While it has long been true, now more than ever we see that “teacher training institutions should consider their teacher educators to be gatekeepers when preparing future generations of teachers for the learning environments of the twenty-first century” (Tondeur et al., 2019, p. 1189).

In preparing the articles for this issue, we understood that many teacher educators’ increased use of educational technology was fueled by the Covid-19 crisis. Clearly, Covid-19 accelerated the need to use technology in the preparation of new teachers, who faced challenges in participating in their teacher education coursework remotely and engaging with clinical experiences when K-12 schools were not able to offer placements on site. But this special issue is not simply about great things teacher educators did during a pandemic. Instead, we wanted to share some strong examples of using technology as a platform for exceptional teaching and learning that can push our thinking about how we prepare new teachers both for and through emerging technologies at any time.

Included in this special issue are five pieces that represent a diversity of teacher education contexts, program areas, and approaches to infusing technology in ways that advance their goals. In Eisenbach’s article “Understanding the Preservice Teacher Experience in an Asynchronous Middle Level Collaboration,” we learn about how pre-service teachers learn about how middle school learners interact with and think about literature through a sustained, asynchronous virtual literature discussion, a practice that can connect teacher candidates to learners without the barriers of geography or time.

Jones, Durham and Cataneo’s “Rising to the Challenge: Preparing Pre-Service Teachers During a Global Pandemic” orients us to the need for guided opportunities for pre-service teachers to practice teaching virtually as a part of their teacher preparation, and Glaser, Helmsing, Parker and Zenkov’s “Adding the ‘T’ to the ‘PACK’ in Clinical Experiences: How Technology Shaped Our Pandemic Teacher Education Pedagogies and Partnerships” extends this to the clinical placement arena.

In Bonafini and Lee’s study “Portraying Mathematics Pre-service Teachers’ Experience of Creating Video Lessons with Portable Interactive Whiteboards through the TPACK,” we dive deeper into particular pedagogies for the mathematics educator and how those technologies are being rehearsed in teacher preparation. Finally, in Streeter, Kavanagh, Thacker, and Aaron’s “Town Halls, Graffiti Walls and Exploding Atoms: Dialogue, Engagement, and Perspective-Taking in Online Teacher Education” we gain insight into drama-based approaches that create community and engagement and learn how they transferred from on-campus to online environments.

Each piece takes us to the virtual backstage where we can understand the teacher educators’ conceptual thinking, theories of teacher learning, pedagogical objectives, and technology tools selected along with providing us with the practical application and results so we can selectively and skillfully adapt these approaches in our practice.