(963)CONTEMPLATING THE MEANING OF NEW PEDAGOGY IN A TECHNOLOGICAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT WITHIN A PAPERLESS SCHOOL

摘要

Theoreticians as well as practitioners in the 21st century are still engaged in the improvement oflearning and instruction (Stigler & Hiebert, 2009). It is common knowledge that within technologicalenvironments students' learning is enhanced (Nachmias, Mioduser & Forkosh-Baruch, 2008). Thestudy presented hereafter is a result of a partnership between a college of education and a fullytechnological paperless high-school where pre-service teachers who study at the college experienceteaching. The aim of the qualitative study within the phenomenological research paradigm was toexplore the meaning of new pedagogy from the perspectives of fourteen participants in the partnershipwho enrolled in the study - college lecturers and researchers, position holders and teachers in thehigh-school, pre-service teachers and high-school students of the ninth grade. The outline of the studyinvolved an integration of several qualitative research designs and data collection instruments(Creswell, 2013).Research design incorporated data obtained from two sources - five meetings heldin the paperless school in 2015, and sixteen reflections that teachers in that school have written. In thefive meetings the meaning of new pedagogy was contemplated by fourteen participants in the study ina discussion that followed a simulation - a pedagogical demonstration of a lesson or project previouslytaught in that school. The five meetings were documented and transcribed and data analysis involveddirect content analysis of the transcripts (Shannon & Hsieh, 2005), and was performed by four of theparticipants - the researchers. Sixteen reflections of sixteen teachers in that high-school who havedescribed one lesson that each of them had chosen were also analyzed through direct contentanalysis by the four researchers. Findings point to fourteen immanent characteristics of new pedagogythat were identified in the five meetings as well as in the sixteen reflections - engagement, higherorder thinking skills, collaboration, accessibility, creativity, gaming, immediacy, multimodality,authenticity, the use of simulations and models, multidiscipline, dissolution of boundaries of time andplace, switching roles, and choice. Some of the characteristics are inter-dependent and form a cultureof pedagogy that is context specific, is perceived as optimal pedagogy in recent research (Pederson,2004), and differs from traditional contexts of learning and instruction.