Conceptions of digital culture in teacher education: an analysis of the concept in student teachers’ perceptions

Abstract

Understanding how digital culture is conceived can be a key to interpreting central processes of contemporary life and, in the field of teacher education, it acquires additional weight, since undergraduate teaching students are at once subjects immersed in digital culture and future mediators of this culture in the classroom. This article investigates how undergraduate students from ten centers of a course offered through the Universidade Aberta do Brasil (Open University of Brazil) conceive of digital culture, and what this conception reveals about formative gaps and opportunities. Content Analysis (Bardin, 2016) was adopted, moving through the phases of pre-analysis, exploration of the material, and treatment of results, applied to 333 conceptual responses produced within a curricular component. The thematic coding, of a multi-label type, was organized into seven conceptual categories and six categories of examples. The results reveal a conception structured in layers: the technological-instrumental (87%) and communicational-relational (82%) dimensions predominate, followed by the informational (67%) and every day (66%) dimensions, while the anthropological reading, digital culture as a way of life, appears in 47% and the critical dimension in only 19%. Among the examples, social media (52%) and entertainment (32%) prevail. We conclude that undergraduate teaching students clearly perceive what is done with technology and how it connects people, but tend to remain at this layer, without advancing toward the anthropological and critical meanings of the phenomenon. This anthropological silence constitutes the study's most distinctive finding and points, concretely, to three shifts that teacher education is called upon to promote: from instrument to way of life, from consumption to authorship, and from ease to criticality.