Challenges in educating student art teachers in technology comprehension

This paper focuses on a study of what teaching competences technology comprehension requires (TC) for teacher education. The background for the study involved a national initiative about developing TC as a teaching subject and integrating it into the existing Danish school curriculum. To follow up on a large-scale national experimental project in primary schools, the ministry launched a small-scale qualification project to promote this integration and develop teacher educators’ competences. The project involved teacher educators representing several school subjects, including visual arts, which was the scientific object of the study in this paper. The qualification project was framed as a network process with research input and peer discussions of learning designs among a group of 20 researchers and 40 teacher educators. The teacher educators applied their produced designs as a part of the ordinary curriculum for teacher education, with two interventions at their home university and shared experiences with the group. This paper reports these interventions. The theoretical framework of the study drew on subjects related to visual arts education, TC theory and social material insights. As part of the larger qualification project, the methodological approach employed design-based research (DBR). The study demonstrated how the implementation of TC in an existing teaching subject became a negotiation between the teaching subject, the students and the teacher regarding how to integrate a new aspect of professionalism into visual arts education. When incorporating elements from computer science into visual arts education, the levelling of two different paradigms are crucial. Although digital technology has been a tool for practicing visual arts for 20 years, both students and teachers found it difficult to implement programming and computational thinking elements and maintain the art focus. This created a new challenge for the art teacher, who was forced to develop re-conceptualisation skills by converting programming into hacking activities and thereby facilitating the students' artistic approach to TC.