| Recent reforms in secondary English preservice teacher education have resulted in programmatic shifts impacting both what our teachers believe and the strategies that they put into practice. One significant reform movement has been in the area of technology, challenging programs of English teacher education to integrate multiple technological and communication literacies in order to prepare teachers for work in multimodal classrooms. As teacher education programs work to integrate technology throughout the teacher education program and respond to national technology standards, expectations for what technology-integrated instructional practices student teachers carry into classroom instruction have increased. Teaching secondary English/Language Arts with technology requires that teachers apply content and pedagogical knowledge related to reading, literature, writing, speaking, viewing and representing, taking advantage of the unique capacities of technology tools in such a way as to meet instructional objectives in a richer, more effective way than what could otherwise be accomplished.; This study followed five preservice secondary English/Language Arts student teachers were completing a content-specific, technology integrated program of studies. The research design for the study included multiple classroom observations, interviews and document analysis of lesson plans written and taught during the placement. The data were analyzed to establish how these teachers taught with technology, given their preparation and teaching placements where access was not an issue.; Constructivism, Shulman's Model of Pedagogical Reasoning (2003), and the Conference on English Education Guidelines for Using Technology to Prepare Secondary English/Language Arts Teachers (2000) were used as conceptual frameworks for the study. Analytical induction was used to analyze data, resulting in seven empirical assertions. Results indicated that the instructional beliefs of the cooperating instructor, as perceived by the student teacher, wielded what they identified as a stronger influence on the instructional practices than the values and models embedded within the teacher education program. Further, the study provides description of the pedagogical thinking that student teachers deploy when teaching. Although each student teacher, regardless of their instructional beliefs (i.e., student-centered and constructivist, or teacher-directed and content-centered), experienced the same stages of Shulman's (2003) cycle of pedagogical reasoning, the ways and stages in which they considered the use of technology differed significantly. |
