Preservice teachers’ conceptions about computers: an ongoing search for transformative appropriations of modern technologies

Abstract

Due to the variety of text forms that are being created as a result of improving information technologies, understandings of literacy must be broadened to include a variety of meaning‐making modes in order to include different social, cultural, and material contexts. The following case study examined the conceptions of technology held by two English preservice teachers enrolled in a required educational technology course designed to encourage the appropriation and integration of transformative uses of technology. Qualitative methodology was used in order to construct a detailed, intrinsic study. Cross‐case analyses established that the preservice teachers saw technology as a primarily utilitarian tool rather than a transformational one. These conceptions were greatly influenced by their personal experiences with technology and were not altered greatly by the content and/or theories presented in the educational technology course. For the greater teacher and teaching research community, significant aspects of this study include the attempt to relay preservice teachers’ conceptions of technology from a qualitative, emic perspective, to add to the body of pedagogical narratives recording learners’ experiences with evolving information technologies, and to broaden research fields that examine knowledge bases of preservice teacher conceptions as well as those that investigate technological conceptions, classifications, and categorizations.