TOC and ICT

I am transcribing interviews from our teacher candidate researchers recorded at the beginning of their induction year. One consistent finding I will discuss in my dissertation is teacher candidates’ reports that the Teacher on Call (TOC) was not conducive to implementing ICT in their teaching.

We were interested in the possibility of new teachers providing ICT leadership in existing schools’ technological cultures. What our teacher candidate researchers described was a lack of opportunities to use ICT because their TOC teaching duties did not include any ICT, and they were not allowed to improvise using ICT to teach TOC lessons.

What I find interesting about this finding is that the in-service teachers who required a TOC did not leave any teaching or learning activities that involved ICT for the TOC to implement. If our teacher candidate researcher was to bring any ICT into their teaching practice for these placements, they would be bringing an outside entity into the classroom technological culture, and the technological culture of that particular in-service teacher.

Given the tenuous position of a TOC, particularly a new teacher in their induction year, it was highly unlikely that they would even have a chance to use ICT while teaching, much less provide ICT leadership to the in-service teacher.