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Mobilising and Transforming Teacher Education Pedagogies
Start date: Sep 1, 2014, End date: Aug 31, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Despite the increasing popularity and adoption of mobile devices by young peoples, universities and schools are only recently starting to consider if and how these technologies can be harnessed for formal learning and there is a dearth of research-informed advice and guidance to support educators in integrating them into their practices to effect pedagogical change. This is particularly noticeable in Teacher Education which straddles both the Higher Education and school sectors, helping to prepare new teachers, and in turn students, for the challenges of the 21st century. What little research exists suggests teacher educators and lecturers, are ill-prepared to grasp the opportunities which mobile phones and the tablet computers offer, and are unaware of the pedagogical transformations which might be achieved if they are harnessed effectively. Emerging research undertaken by members of this project team show that teacher educators and other academics are interested and excited about the opportunities to embrace mobile technologies in their teaching but are also ignorant about what constitutes good practice in this field or how to go about implementing such pedagogies at both an individual and institutional level. This cross-sectoral project addresses these needs and in so doing it meets a number of key European priorities identified by all of the project partners including those of 'modernising practices (in this case pedagogies) in Higher Education, revising and strengthening the professional profile of the teaching profession, and utilising ICT as a vehicle to support and transform learning. It would be impossible to leverage such changes without a cross-sectoral partnership which brings together academics, teacher educators and school teachers working across boundaries around this common theme of developing 21st century pedagogies. This partnership consists of three European universities which specialise in preparing and training new teachers (Hull, Bergen and Karlsruhe) along with two other universities who have been included because of their specific skills and expertise in the design and construction of multimedia artefacts for mobile learning (Stuttgart) and the design and theoretical modelling of mobile learning scenarios in teacher education (UTS, Australia). Three secondary schools complete the partnership (Hull; Bergen and Karlsruhe) and these have been selected because of their existing involevment and support for European intercultural actitivities, their expertise in using technology, and their direct involvement in the preparation of trainee teachers. Together the partnership offers a complementary blend of expertise skill sets to achieved the overall ambitions of the project and to establish the basis of an ongoing European/International m-learning network. To achieve these ambitions project partners will adopt a Design Based Research (DBR) which will work with partners to iteratively construct four outcomes which include a mobile learning toolkit to support educators in evaluating and implementing mobile learning pedagogies; a set of e-Books across a range of curriculum areas to exemplify how teachers and students can use mobile technologies to co-author original materials; an online training course in iTunesU to support educators in using mobile technologies, and a set of academic publications to validate and further disseminate the outcomes of this project to a wider audience. As a result of this project teacher educators and teachers will have a greater understanding and ability to incorporate the use of mobile technologies into their practice in ways which brings about significant pedagogical change. They will have access to a European wide network of practitioners and resources/training materials that helps them to exploit the unique affordances of these technologies and in so doing enables them to prepare trainees and students to be more skillful in the use and application of digital literacies and other 21st century skills, thus helping them to become more employable and better learners. In the longer term this network and the resources created by the project will contribute to establishing Europe as a centre for innovation and excellence in the use of mobile learning and associated pedagogies in teacher education and higher education and will act as a beacon for modernising of the teaching profession more widely.
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