Teaching Practice in the 21st Century: Emerging Trends, Challenges and Opportunities

Digital technology for teaching practice students means the ability of student teachers to use digital artefacts as integral part of their pedagogical content knowledge. Student teachers need to be also aware of what implications this has for teaching and learning strategies plus the building aspects in the lesson presentation. A new approach to teaching practice, calibrated for the 21 century, requires teachers to be willing to assist the student teachers in this regard. The teaching practice period is meant to expose student teachers to the most sobering technological frontier in history because they inherit a complex set of global dilemmas and this emphasise the rational of this study. The proposed study aims to prepare teaching practice students for the classrooms of the future. Teachers often expressed their lack of confidence in their digital technology skills and this can implicitly affect their attitudes towards the use of digital technology in their teaching. Therefore, the presenters argue that, the teaching practice student should be empowered in the fast-paced digital environment of the current millennium generation. Teachers often do not expect learners to be sharing knowledge through connections. This is a key aspect of learning in the digital age within a connectivist learning theory. The empirical research has been conducted in an interpretive qualitative paradigm underpinned by a complexity theory conceptual framework. Convenience sampling has been used in this study. One teacher from each of the three secondary schools in Gauteng has been selected to participate. This study has challenged the participating teachers to reflect on their own teaching praxis when using digital technology as an integrated part of their pedagogical content knowledge. One of the outputs of this research study is a model for teachers to use as an example for training the teaching practice students. This model can also be a source of information for digital technology literacy education. The intention is to guide teaching practice students to develop their own programmes for digital technology literacy to meet the teaching demands for the 21 century.