Self-determined teacher learning in a digital context fundamental change in thinking and practice
Butler, Deirdre
(2004)
Self-determined teacher learning in a digital context fundamental change in thinking and practice.
PhD thesis, Dublin City University.
“Self-determined Teacher Learning in a Digital Context” reports on a
longitudinal study of teacher empowerment through Constructionist learning about
computational technologies and learning about learning itself.
The study includes but looks beyond how teachers engage with technology, to
how they redefine their own understandings o f learning as they use technology in
working alongside their students. The teachers’ emerging self-reflective practice enables
them to better understand the multifaceted structure of the learning situation and their
own relations to its social, cognitive, and affective aspects. The “Empowering Minds”
study also addresses how teachers can become critical judges o f technologies, in order
to define for themselves and suggest for others what being digital can mean in learning.
These processes have the potential to change educational strategies on personal,
community and national scales. How teachers understand learning and how we
conceptualise teacher learning will directly affect future generations’ potentials.
Teachers grapple with epistemological issues in designing and developing
environments around new protean materials that enable each person’s construction of
ideas and expression of self. Learning theory becomes less abstract and more
meaningful as teachers create a language for talking among themselves about learning.
The resulting concrétisation of learning processes becomes possible through anchoring
the learning with and about technologies in the teachers’ everyday reality o f the
classroom.
Teachers become empowered to use their own practice as “an object-to-thinkwith”
in the Papertian sense. By externalising and examining their understandings of
learning, they experiment with and ultimately transform their teaching practice, their
relationships with their students, and their understandings of their role as teachers.
Constructionists have been challenged to demonstrate that their assertions about
education work. The approach described here is a compelling response. Furthermore its
continuance among the original participants and its extension to a variety o f new
initiatives demonstrate both sustainability and scalability.