Pedagogical infrastructures in multidisciplinary technology education

Abstract

In multidisciplinary technology education, teachers work together to support pupils in designing with technology. The different forms of support are based on establishing pedagogical infrastructures for pupils’ learning of technology. Although previous studies have identified the main forms of pedagogical infrastructure, how they can be leveraged in collaborative technology education remains elusive. This study adopts the perspective of teaching teams in exploring the kinds of pedagogical infrastructures involved in the collaborative planning and implementation of support for learning by collaborative designing (LCD). The data consist of semi-structured interviews with 11 technology education teaching teams. The participants were 21 experienced in-service teachers who worked in primary, secondary, and general upper secondary schools. A multiple case study approach was applied to identify the differences between the teaching teams in the planning and implementation phases. The data were analyzed following the principles of qualitative content analysis. The findings revealed that the application of pedagogical infrastructures varied during the teaching teams’ process of collaboration. In the planning phase, support was mainly based on establishing material-technological infrastructures. In the implementation phase, teachers often leveraged scaffolding and epistemological infrastructures. Pedagogical infrastructures were mostly targeted for the early stages of the LCD process, as well as in the stage of experimenting and testing design ideas.