“Are we Producing Teachers for the 4IR Digitized Classroom?” – A Case Study of a School of Education

Abstract

With over two years of remote online learning, this paper assessed the extent to which academics in a School of Education (SoE) at a South African university employed their espoused (Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge) TPACK in preparing teachers for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) classroom. Besides facilitating the development of disciplinary expertise, academics were expected to engage students with technological and other cross-functional skills needed to succeed as global citizens in a digitized society. Premised on the TPACK framework, a mixed-method approach using data from questionnaires distributed to all the academics in the SoE and interviews with five academics from the different disciplinary clusters of the SoE were analysed to explore their self-assessed TPACK to understand how academics prepare future teachers for the digitized 4IR classrooms. The findings suggest that academics may possess the relevant TPACK, but online educational practices may not have sufficiently equipped future teachers with the competence to thrive in the 4IR classroom. The outcome of this research provides valuable insights into academics' TPACK, especially those in teacher education, regarding their online pedagogical pursuit, the SoE in their quest to produce teachers fit for the 4IR classroom, and the scholarship of digital transformation in general.