Curriculum Development in Technology-Enhanced Environments

Abstract

As teacher-educators, we are acutely aware of our responsibilities in nurturing the knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs of pre-service teachers. As part of our interest in improving our teaching, learning, and assessment practices, we have been participating in an action-research project on technology-enhanced assessment over the last 12 months. Throughout this collaboration, we have become aware of our assessment practices and have been delighted that this has also resulted in a questioning of our current learning design for our modules and further clarity in our own thinking about why we teach the way that we do. The process of action-research has forced us to examine our educational beliefs and how these motivate our teaching and learning. This article focuses on why as teacher-educators it is our obligation to articulate our theories of teaching and learning. It is essential that we articulate these often-implicit theories not only as a means of engaging in dialogue with other teacher-educators, but also as a means of engaging in dialogue with our own students who are pre-service teachers. This cascading waterfall of dialogue and explicitness may allow pre-service teachers to gain insight into the decisions we make as teacher-educators and the rationale we use in our teaching. This obligation has important ramifications for the education of children in the Hong Kong setting, as pre-service teachers may see these explicit rationales as a guide to their own teaching within the early childhood, primary, and secondary settings.