An agentic perspective on teachers’ enactment of professional digital competence

Abstract

Understanding digital competence in teaching is challenging because technology and teachers’ workdays are moving targets. Previous research suggests using professional digital competence (PDC) as an approach for better understanding how teachers develop a deep understanding of technology, learning processes and subjects. Accordingly, inspired by a short-term design-based research methodology, a project was conceived to have a group of teachers and teacher educators collaborate on developing digital teaching environments using Microsoft Class Teams and OneNote Class Notebook at a lower secondary school in Norway. To investigate the outcomes, this paper adopts an agentic socio-cultural perspective to examine how the teachers enacted digital teaching environments to develop PDC. The results show that the teachers employed negotiation strategies and used different material and immaterial resources in their local school contexts to enact digital teaching environments. The study suggests adding new research to two emerging and relevant research streams—teachers’ digital competence and Microsoft Class Teams and the OneNote Class Notebook—by emphasising a strong human-centric agency approach and that teachers’ digital competence can be made visible through acts of collaboration.