TPACK (Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge) Vernaculars in Social Studies Research

• In Event: Education Technology, Teacher Knowledge, and Classroom Impact: Frameworks and Approaches to Research

Abstract

Objectives

We introduce the concept of vernaculars to represent local conditions and tendencies, which arise from using technology in social studies. We further explore specific TPACK vernaculars as they take form in planning and teaching social studies.

Theoretical Framework(s)

TPACK. Technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) is a helpful context for exploring the various ways teachers use technology in their planning and teaching. TPACK emerges out of multiple contexts, involving a complex and situated process that occurs within very local and particular contexts.

Vernaculars. One of the unique characteristics of social studies is that it enables experiences that both reflect and represent democratic life. In much the same way, new Web 2.0 technologies may also enable experiences that reflect and represent democratic life. The similarities between the nature of social studies and the functions of these new technologies provide the basis for a rationale to make deliberate use of Web 2.0 in social studies. Such considerations for how Web 2.0 technologies support democratic life are vernacular or local in origin and reflect specific conditions in democratic culture and specific aims in social studies.

Method(s)

The data were analyzed qualitatively in the framework of TPACK and findings emerged as vernacular strategies for using materials that were embedded in content and pedagogy. We identified themes to describe the decisions and activities in which participants engaged.

Data Sources

Participants (N=84) were pre-service social studies teacher education students in four separate graduate level social studies courses, taught over four consecutive years. Data were collected on subjects’ interactions through (1) participants’ written instructional plans, (2) observations of in-class discussions and email communication about participants’ work, and (3) meta-cognitive writing about the processes participants undertook as they developed instructional plans using American Memory (AM), a digital collection project of United States Library of Congress.

Results

The data revealed a three-step process of engagement with AM resources that reflected the way participants located and used subject-specific resources for constructing instructional ideas. The first strategy participants used was to engage resources in order to develop a context for using a given resource. The second strategy involved the personal delimitation of specific resources given its empirical characteristics, which involved a vetting to determine the resource’s value given participant-sensitive characteristics such as length, reproductive quality, complexity, relevance, and consistent accessibility. The third strategy involved the pedagogical elaboration of the resource. In this process, pre-service teacher participants began to think about how the resource might be adapted and tailored for specific student use.

Significance

This presentation presents specific, vernacular instances of how TPACK emerged in the use of collaborative Web 2.0 technologies to support teaching and learning aimed at democratic life, situated tightly within the contexts of lived democratic experiences. Research and theorizing on vernacular forms of TPACK in social studies can aid teachers as they reflect on their own experiences teaching with technology. Such scholarship can also help teacher educators deepen their knowledge about how TPACK emerges in an effort to guide the development of pre-service teacher-knowledge.

Authors

• John K. Lee, North Carolina State University

• Meghan McGlinn Manfra, North Carolina State University