Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 68, October 2013, Pages 1-8
Computers & Education

Student teachers' conceptions of technology: A metaphor analysis

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2013.04.024Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Student teachers identified 58 distinct metaphors to conceptualize technology.

  • Emerged five themes: development, facilitation, vital necessity, power, threat.

  • Gender and major had no significant effect on their conceptions.

  • They had a narrow view of technology focusing on artifact characteristics.

  • Curricular implications for pre-service teacher education were discussed.

Abstract

This research applied metaphor analysis to investigate student teachers' conceptions of technology. The sample included 237 students enrolled in technical pre-service teacher education in Turkey. Participants were given a questionnaire consisting of demographic questions and the prompt “Technology is like … because …” to articulate their conceptualizations of technology. Data were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Participants produced 58 distinct mental images clustered into five conceptual categories that characterize technology as development, facilitation, vital necessity, power, and threat. Gender and major had no significant effect on their conceptions. Overall, the results suggest that student teachers' conception of technology is restricted and mostly focuses on artifact and technical dimensions. The implications and potential ways for constructing balanced and broader conceptualization of technology were discussed within the context of teacher education curriculum.

Introduction

Teacher education institutions have been focusing on equipping their students with the knowledge and skills to be successful in today's rapidly changing technological world. This is in alignment with the recent educational standards that expect teachers to use information and communication technology (ICT) in order to enhance learning and teaching in the schools. Nevertheless, recent surveys suggest that technology has not been effectively used for facilitating meaningful learning in the schools yet (Ertmer & Ottenbreit–Leftwich, 2010). Technology integration has been identified as a complex process affected by individual, contextual, and technical factors (Inan & Lowther, 2010; Levin & Wadmany, 2008; Sime & Priestley, 2005). Although some of these have been disappearing as access to technology in the schools and teachers' relevant competency have improved, teachers' belief systems still remain as the key barrier or enabler for achieving effective technology integration (Ertmer, 2005). Therefore, this study aimed to explore student teachers' conceptual beliefs about the nature of technology through metaphor analysis.

Previous studies indicate that successful technology integration depends on external issues such as adequate budget, time, access to technological equipments, technical support, professional staff development, and administrative support (Bauer & Kenton, 2005; Iding, Crosby, & Speitel, 2002; Rogers, 2000). These factors usually come into the picture after student teachers graduate from teacher education programs and start working in the schools, and vary according to their schools' local conditions. The related literature has numerous research studies exploring the effects of such factors and provides some structural and administrative suggestions related to how to deal with them positively.

Neither mere presence of technology nor technology awareness by itself assures that technology will be used to enhance teaching and learning. Technology implementation requires profound changes in the role of teachers and students, epistemological views, instructional strategies and tools, curriculum standards, and school culture. Resistance to such changes inhibits from effective integration. There are also issues along with pre-service training years at the colleges of education. Prior technology experiences including increased exposure to technology and its educational applications, completion of technology courses, and faculty modeling technology integration activities have been shown to facilitate the occurrence and adaptation to these changes (Adamy & Boulmetis, 2006; Albion, 2001; Beyerbach, Walsh, & Vannatta, 2001).

One another essential factor is the set of teachers' beliefs about technology and its role in classroom teaching (Ertmer, 2005; Ottenbreit–Leftwich, Glazewski, Newby, & Ertmer, 2010). These beliefs may regard to instructional role of technology, consequences of technology use on teachers and students, and pedagogical match between technology and teaching philosophies. For example, Sugar, Crawley, and Fine (2004) found that personal beliefs in benefits and detriments of technology for the development of students were associated with teachers' decision to utilize a new technology. Salient beliefs among the teachers they interviewed included “preparing students for their future careers, exposing students to a variety of new technologies, holding students' interest, enabling students to gain additional skills and making student to dependent on technology” (p.205). In another study conducted by Beyerbach et al. (2001), pre-service teachers embraced technology as an enhancement for motivating students, making learning activities more interesting, addressing diverse learning styles, and improving student learning.

Belief systems often start being formed in early years and include psychological attributes such as attitudes, judgments, assumptions, and conceptions. Pre-service education is an important period through which student teachers reinforce or change their existing belief structures. It is known that beliefs of student teachers can significantly filter their processing of new information and impact their future teaching practices (Pajares, 1992; Richardson, 1996). This suggests that student teachers' conceptions need to be explored in order to identify knowledge base and motivations required for the implementation of new ideas to occur, and ultimately to achieve meaningful conceptual change. Therefore, there has been a growing research interest in exploring teachers' pedagogical or educational beliefs (Ertmer, 2005; Tondeur, Hermans, van Braak, & Valcke, 2008), self–efficacy beliefs (Anderson & Maninger, 2007), and value beliefs (Ottenbreit–Leftwich et al., 2010) that underlies their educational uses of technology. Most of these studies explored how teachers appreciate technology (i.e., attitudes toward technology). The present study attempted to make a contribution to this area by investigating student teachers' conceptions about the nature of technology (i.e., beliefs of what technology is) through metaphor analysis. It was intended that understanding underlying conceptual beliefs and ideas about what technology is could provide significant implications for their effective preparation as well as future decisions and practices in technology integration. The following research questions guided the study: (1) What metaphorical images do student teachers use to conceptualize technology? What rationale do they provide to justify those images? (2) In what ways, if any, do demographic variables influence student teachers' conceptions of technology?

Section snippets

Metaphor analysis as a research tool

The oldest and widely known definition of metaphor slightly modified by Leary (1994) is “giving to one thing a name or description that belongs by convention to something else, on the grounds of some similarity between the two” (p.4). The essence of metaphor is “understanding or experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p.5) that is already known and understood very well. Hence, metaphor is not simply a name, but more than that, it is a figure of thought

Results

The analysis of participants' responses for the open-ended prompt produced 58 distinct metaphors for the concept of technology. Sorting and comparing these images identified five main conceptual categories. Table 1 demonstrates the frequencies for these categories and related metaphors. The average number of participants per metaphor (237/58) is about 4 while the actual frequencies of metaphors ranged from 1 to 45 participants. Hence, of the 58 metaphors, 19 were represented by 4 or more

Discussion and conclusion

The findings indicate that student teachers understand and appreciate the acceleration of technological changes and their potential consequences on the society. Most participants have narrow view of technology focusing on technical or instrumental characteristics because their metaphors describes formal nature of technology rather than its ambivalent functions and relationships with human activities, cultures, politics, and so on. This is accordant with the common finding in the literature in

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