Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
AAAL Conference 2024, Texas, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri, 16 Mart - 19 Mayıs 2024, (Yayınlanmadı)
In Beck’s (1992) terms, contemporary risk societies have recently experienced unprecedented shifts characterized by linguistic and cultural diversity and techno-pedagogical challenges in education since the COVID-19. Hence, top-down traditional structures of authority and expertise need to be replaced with autonomous individual initiatives and collaborative interdisciplinary approaches towards the solution of complicated problems in social and political organizations. Indeed, this exploratory case study attempts to align Turkish pre-service teacher education programs with such a shift for a “highly differentiated, though strongly connected world where a top-down mastery is impossible” (Hartman, 2017, p.8) in line with the risk society theory (Beck, 2000). This study also adopts the systems-theoretical perspective, proposing teacher education in risk societies should aim to promote diversity and reflexivity by regulating the balance between the government’s authority and the autonomy of higher education institutions (Bejan,Janatuien,& Juvelin, 2015; Rosa & Teixeria, 2014). The study aims to investigate the prospective teachers’ practicum engagement when they strive to handle educational challenges. This can be considered as a response to a change in emphasis throughout teacher education programs towards raising reflective, digitally-literate, critical, and inclusive practitioners with a thorough understanding of ethical and social concerns surrounding technology integration (Fuchs, 2014; Srnicek, 2017). The research was conducted with 48 senior pre-service teachers during practicum in the 2021/2022 academic year. Data were collected via reflective journals, interviews, and field-notes to be analyzed via content analysis. Findings include the contribution of pre-service teachers’ engagement in interactive and reflective pedagogical activities to cultural and societal awareness towards coping with pedagogical and digital challenges. Implications displayed that the 21st century teacher education programs should pursue an autonomous decentralized and contextualized policy of education across disciplines (EUA, 2014).