Abstract

Background: This research deals with science teachers' worldviews in the educational-technological context. Obtaining a deeper insight into teachers' discourse regarding school digitalization and understanding teachers' worldviews in the educational-technological context may be viewed as crucially important since the latter tends to play a central role in the process of digitalization of teaching practices. Methods: This study addresses the following questions: (1) Was there a difference between the teachers regarding their foci of attention expressed via personal pronouns? (2) Was there a difference between the teachers in terms of the quality and degree of their emotional immersion in the discussed topic expressed through the use of emotion words? (3) What are the semantic fields of the word clusters that include the lexemes technology and digital, and do they implicitly convey differences in teachers' understanding of school digitalization? The data were extracted by means of in-depth interviews with 38 Israeli science teachers. The linguistic analysis was employed to examine teachers' language behavior. Results: The results point out the differences in teachers' worldviews, manifested through language behavior. In particular, the differences between the three groups of teachers (outside observers, circumspect participants, and conscientious participants) were found regarding their foci of attention, the level of emotional immersion, and their implicitly conveyed understanding of the digitalization of teaching practices. Conclusions: The teachers' worldviews are the key element for understanding what it means to be or not to be a teacher in a digital society. In addition, our study demonstrates that linguistic analysis in educational research is a promising methodological approach that can render an in-depth and comprehensive picture of the explored phenomenon.

Highlights

  • This research deals with science teachers' worldviews in the educational-technological context

  • Data analysis As it has been mentioned above, our analysis focuses on the three groups of teachers defined by the content structural analysis conducted in the earlier study (Tsybulsky & Levin, 2019): five teachers were assigned to the category of outside observers, 12 were assigned to the category of circumspect participants, and 21 teachers were assigned to the category of conscientious participants

  • Since the conscientious participants were predominantly focused on the situational context, they tended to use more non-speech-role references than the outside observers or the circumspect participants (57 vs. 39 and 45, respectively)

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Summary

Introduction

This research deals with science teachers' worldviews in the educational-technological context. Obtaining a deeper insight into teachers' discourse regarding school digitalization and understanding teachers' worldviews in the educational-technological context may be viewed as crucially important since the latter tends to play a central role in the process of digitalization of teaching practices. (3) What are the semantic fields of the word clusters that include the lexemes technology and digital, and do they implicitly convey differences in teachers' understanding of school digitalization? The linguistic analysis was employed to examine teachers' language behavior. The differences between the three groups of teachers (outside observers, circumspect participants, and conscientious participants) were found regarding their foci of attention, the level of emotional immersion, and their implicitly conveyed understanding of the digitalization of teaching practices. Our study demonstrates that linguistic analysis in educational research is a promising methodological approach that version 3 (revision)

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