Interviews and Model Cases

I have completed the technical use analysis and three interviews this week. The interviews were with Keith Leatham, a math ed professor at BYU; Summer Rupper, a geology professor at BYU; and Punya Mishra and Matt Koehler, the creators of the TPACK framework. All three were very enlightening conversations.

Keith Leatham: reminded me that each of these constructs represents knowledge and that the examples I'm finding are simply evidence of that knowledge.

Summer Rupper: knew nothing about TPACK before I interviewed her, but gave me model cases of all three constructs during our discussion. She talked about how she uses technology when she is doing field and lab work and how that technology has changed what she can do and how it represents her work (TCK). She talked about how she uses PowerPoint to organize her lectures, emphasize main points, and represent concepts visually (TPK). And she talked about how her students struggle to understand certain concepts and how she uses technology to help them understand those concepts better (TPCK). I think these examples may have a place as a central feature of the model cases section because they are all REAL and very pure.

Mishra & Koehler: emphasized that this framework is supposed to be a representation of teacher knowledge, so all of these constructs do have a place in education. They also gave me some advice for improving my definitions to make sure I emphasize the interactive nature of the relationship between the types of knowledge within each construct. The difficult part of that is that I am trying to use the essential features as criteria for classifying examples of technology use that I find in the classroom and the literature. With TCK, for example, Mishra and Koehler emphasized that it is both how the technology represents or changes the content AND how the content directs the use of technology. I don't think most examples that I find will demonstrate both sides of this, so I'll have to find a way to represent that interaction in the definition without limiting the possible examples to those that demonstrate both.

I have a few more interviews scheduled for next week - I would like to get even a couple more. I have invitations out but haven't heard back from everyone. For now, I will have six. I would like to have eight. Then I have also considered interviewing an elementary teacher to get a little bit different view on this. One of the things I've been thinking about this week, after a conversation with Maggie Niess, is that the TCK and TPCK that college professors develop will be different from that of secondary teachers and even more different from that of elementary teachers. College professors, and to a large degree secondary teachers, have the opportunity to focus in on one subject area, so they will be able to develop a more in depth understanding of their content and the technologies that go with it. Meanwhile, elementary teachers have to be generalists, learning as much as they can about a lot of different subjects. This means that their TCK may be more broad as they will most likely not have the time to fully explore the technologies available for each subject but will rather generalize their TPK. Dr. Leatham and I had an interesting discussion about this as well. So that would be interesting to explore with an elementary teacher, but I'm not sure that it is an area that I should explore with this study.