Understanding changes in teachers' ICT practices : a longitudinal perspective

With the introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into schools came the expectation that teachers would adopt ICT and change their practices in particular ways. Research indicates that teachers have not changed in the ways expected. Suggested in this paper is that limitations in current research methodologies documenting change in teachers' practices are restricting thorough examination of change in teachers' practices mediated by ICT. This paper reports on the design of a study aimed at investigating teachers' practices from an alternative position from the current research. The research design is a grounded, longitudinal, qualitative study using assorted analysis for the collection and interpretation of the data. This involves a combination of secondary analysis of archive data and collection and analysis of primary data. Participants were able to retrospectively describe and understand their own archived and new data, in interviews and observations. This paper focuses on ways this research design supported examining teachers' practices as including a number of dimensions and the way these dimensions were influenced by the context in which they were situated. Also, the ways this research design provided a means for examining the changes that developed from the teachers' own narratives. This gave some insight into the ways the teachers' understood the changes in their own practices. Examining change from this perspective supports understanding of how and why changes in teaching practices mediated by ICT occur or don't occur. It also contributes to examining the bigger phenomenon of ICT and the long-term impact it is having on teaching practices.