The Construct is in the Eye of the Beholder: School Districts’ Appropriations and Reconceptualizations of TPACK

Despite debates about the specific parameters of its eight subcomponents, TPACK is generally understood within university-based teacher education communities as the knowledge needed to incorporate technologies—especially digital tools and resources—effectively in teaching and learning. How do professional development providers working within primary and secondary schools and districts conceptualize and operationalize TPACK? Our study of educational technology-related professional development in seven North American schools and districts in seven states/provinces found that educational leaders’ discussion and operationalization of the TPACK construct differs from that of university-based researchers in intriguing and important ways. In these organizations, TPACK was both appropriated to reconnect curriculum and pedagogy with educational technology use after prior technocentric professional development was found to be lacking, and reconceptualized to focus more upon practice than knowledge. Nine years have passed since the TPACK (technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge) theoretical construct (Thompson & Mishra, 2007) was introduced to the global educational technology community as technological pedagogical content knowledge (Koehler & Mishra, 2005; Mishra & Koehler, 2006). In less than a decade, university-based researchers have published approximately 800 articles, chapters, books, dissertations, and conference papers that examine, employ, and critique this way of understanding the knowledge that educators need to facilitate students’ learning using educational technologies, especially digital tools and resources. The appearance of new TPACK-related scholarship over time shows no signs of slowing; during the last year alone, for example, the number of academic publications based in TPACK increased by approximately 25 percent (Harris & Hofer, 2013). Yet as warmly as TPACK has been embraced in university-based teacher educators’ work (Brantley-Dias & Ertmer, 2013), its diffusion in primary and secondary schools and districts has been considerably slower—and, as the results of this study showed, its K-12 conceptualizations and functions differ from how the construct has been understood and used in higher education. Extensive database and Web searches in early summer 2013 yielded approximately 60 elementary and secondary schools or school districts internationally (primarily within North America and Australia) that included mention of the TPACK construct in either organizational or professional development documents. Of those, online documents from 27 schools or districts showed that they had incorporated TPACK either frequently and/or in fundamental ways (e.g., using the construct in a district job title, such as “TPACK Coaches.”) Given TPACK’s origins in higher education (Koehler & Mishra, 2005), its popularity with university-based researchers (Koehler, Mishra, Kereluik, Shin & Graham, 2014; Voogt, Fisser, Roblin, Tondeur, & van Braak, 2013), and an apparent intent for it to be used by researchers and postsecondary teacher educators (Brantley-Dias & Ertmer, 2013), we were curious about how it has made its way to school districts, why it was adopted there, and how it is understood and used in K-12 contexts for professional development purposes. To date, our work helping teachers to develop curriculum-specific TPACK in nine content areas (e.g., Harris & Hofer, 2009; Harris & Hofer, 2011), and assessing performance-based evidence of that knowledge (e.g., Harris, Grandgenett & Hofer, 2012; Hofer, Grandgenett, Harris & Swan, 2011), has focused upon a conscious process for TPACK-based professional development that works within teachers’ everyday instructional planning processes and is taught by teacher educators. We became aware of K-12 schools and districts voluntarily appropriating these TPACK-based planning materials that we have developed, vetted, and made available via a Creative Commons license (http://activitytypes.wm.edu/). We were curious to see if and how the TPACK construct was being used in K-12 contexts in other ways as well. We began the study with no conscious beliefs or suppositions regarding how schools and districts understand and use TPACK for professional development beyond knowing that some K-12 organizations use our materials. We entered into this study, therefore, without expectations of either specific or general answers to our research questions. Also, since relatively few schools and districts’ online documents incorporated the TPACK construct in mid-2013, we thought that leaders within those organizations might find it helpful to consult with each other about the design and implementation of educational technology-related professional development that is informed, to some extent, by TPACK. To facilitate both professional networking among TPACK-using schools and districts, and the structured inquiry that we wished to initiate with a focused group of schooland district-based professional development providers, we organized and planned a two-day “TPACK Symposium.”