‘Even at a collegial level, I drew strength from this journey’: preschool teachers’ development towards a creative-digital teaching approach
TL;DR
The authors found that the teachers considered the collaborative, collegial project to have been beneficial for developing a creative-digital teaching approach and had adopted a ‘side-by-side perspective’ that allowed for teacher agency and adequate, creative pedagogical choices among digital as well as analogue tools.
Abstract
The present study investigates preschool educators’ professional development towards strategies for creative use of digital technology in preschool education during a three-year Erasmus project. Teachers from 15 preschools in Italy, Portugal and Sweden participated in lectures and engaged in national and transnational study visits, discussions and activities. The analysis, using data from focus-group discussions about digital teaching and learning with participants from each of the preschools, focused on the categories past, future and present. The authors found that the teachers considered the collaborative, collegial project to have been beneficial for developing a creative-digital teaching approach. In addition, they had adopted a ‘side-by-side perspective’ that allowed for teacher agency and adequate, creative pedagogical choices among digital as well as analogue tools. Thus, the study contributes to a less researched sub-domain, namely how collective learning processes may promote teachers’ development towards enhancing preschool children’s creative use of digital learning tools.