In a recent article in The Conversation, Dr Keith Turvey and Professor Norbert Pachler challenged both policy makers and researchers to reflect on how effective the last decade of policy and research into technology supported learning has been in enabling the education sector to sustain teaching and learning throughout the coronavirus pandemic.
They argued that: “Teachers need to be supported by policy and research to help them develop expert knowledge on the use of digital technologies. Failure to do so may simply mean re-learning the same lessons over and over again. To help teachers prepare for the unknown challenges ahead, we must build on the lessons of the past.”
The article built on a recent review by Turvey and Pachler into technology supported learning. It introduced the idea of “pedagogical provenance” as an important concept for designing research that can increase the potential usefulness of evidence about educational technologies for practitioners. Research methods that develop pedagogical provenance value and capture teachers’ stories of how methods of teaching using digital technologies came to be used, including the specific purposes and contexts in which they have been developed.
The full research review paper is available here.
By Keith Turvey – Principal Lecturer, University of Brighton, School of Education and Norbert Pachler – Professor of Education and Pro-Vice-Provost: Digital Education, UCL