Co-learning in a Digital Community: Information Literacy and Views on Learning in Pre-school Teacher Education

Abstract

Through analysing how different views on learning enable pre-school teacher students to distinguish and use affordances offered by digital tools and the learning environment, this paper seeks to connect modes of appropriation, identity positions and information activities to types of information literacy. Identity, particularly views on learning, is analysed to find out how a Facebook group to some students remains a sustainable digital community throughout teacher education. The paper reports results from a netnographical study conducted between 2012 and 2015. The material used in the analysis consists primarily of 12 semi-structured student interviews and 6 teacher interviews. In the thematic analysis, a socio-cultural perspective on identity is applied. The concept affordance is used to analyse how identity is connected to use of digital tools and the learning environment. The findings show how the appropriation of the Facebook group is connected to identity positions and views on learning in two types of information literacy: a relational information literacy and a pragmatic information literacy. The normative function of co-learning is found to be an important aspect of the learning environment of pre-school teacher education that explains why the digital community can be experienced as either including or excluding.