Digital Competence and Ways of Thinking and Practising in Swedish Teacher Education: Experiences by teachers with a foreign teaching degree

Digital Competence and Ways of Thinking and Practising in Swedish Teacher Education: Experiences by teachers with a foreign teaching degree

The Swedish government recognises foreign academic education and the professional qualifications of its immigrants by allocating resources to programmes that bridge the gap between immigrants’ education and the specific requirements for work in Sweden. The context of inquiry for this thesis is teachers with a foreign teaching degree, who come from 57 countries or regions and are studying at four Swedish universities. They attend a bridging programme called “Further Education for Foreign Teachers” (in Swedish, Utländska Lärares Vidareutbildning). The purpose of this thesis is to study the unfamiliar ways of thinking and practising teachers with a foreign teaching degree encounter in Swedish teacher education, emphasising digital competence. Five different theoretical frameworks and models are used in this thesis: ways of thinking and practising, redefined transformative learning, the framework of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK), the European Digital Competence Frameworks for Citizens (DigComp 2.1), and the Digital Competence of Educators framework (DigCompEdu). A convergent mixed methods research design was applied; the combined datasets consisted of: (a) a web survey to which 228 teachers responded; (b) five focus groups each consisting of 25 teachers; (c) nine individual interviews; (d) 30 reflective texts written by 15 teachers. Findings show that the participants are not a homogenous group and cannot be treated as such. The common ground is that they are foreign-born teachers who have all immigrated to Sweden. The diversity covers a range, from being quite familiar to being unfamiliar with the Swedish educational context. This thesis reveals the diversity of their digital competence, as they score from foundational proficiency levels to highly specialised ones in TPACK as well as in the European framework DigComp 2.1. Furthermore, their expressed digital competence is found within all role descriptors in the European framework for the digital competence of educators DigCompEdu, from newcomer to pioneer. Diversity was found in teaching philosophy, the role of a teacher, view of the students, how learning occurs, and finally, comprehension of the relationship between education and society. Moreover, the findings highlight that some ways of thinking and practising were unfamiliar to the participants, such as teaching and learning methods, new learning environments, examination practices, further, the communication between teachers and students. Unfamiliarity was also found regarding the extent to which society demands digital competence in the curricula. The participants expressed that their roles as teachers in a new country were unfamiliar and took time to get used to. Therefore, placement supervisors were found to be of great importance for the development of teachers’ digital competence, as they function as mediators and model what it is to be a teacher in Sweden. The analysis shows that all teachers, not only teachers with a migrant background, need digital competence at an advanced level to develop digital competence among students. Thus, educators must identify unfamiliar ways of thinking and practising, plan for authentic competence development, and address the diversity in digital competence. This thesis contributes to empirical findings, developing tools and models to assist teacher educators to change monocultural teaching to an inclusive practice in which diversity is integrated.