Teachers' digital text competences

Digitalization and rapid technological advancements continue to change the possibilities of and demands placed on our textual communication competences. This is turn affects what skills and knowledges teachers should provide their students with. To provide adequate digital literacy and be able to use the full potential of tools and applications for digital text work, teachers themselves need to be competent in digital text processes. One aim of my doctoral study is establishing more knowledge about how year 4–6 teachers digital text competences affect their ability to differentiate (Tomlinson, 2014) their textual work to accommodate individual student needs, within the classroom context. Digital text competences concern digital texts that could be both multimodal and media convergent (Sofkova Hashemi et al., 2020). Thus, the competences require technical as well as textual understanding, i.e. literacy (Jewitt, 2008). Therefore, the study uses both the theories of digital literacies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2008), TPACK in situ (Willermark, 2018) and differentiation (Tomlinson, 2014).

Methodologically my doctoral study will consist of a systematic literature review, followed by a Delphi study (Hsu & Sandford, 2007), which is the focus of this presentation, and lastly cyclic design-based studies in close collaboration with year 4–6 teachers. The aim of the Delphi-study is to better understand which digital competences digitally competent teachers themselves view as most important in differentiating their classroom. The first iteration of the Delphi-study will use the preliminary findings of the systematic review while the following iterations will then be based on the results of the previous one. The key issue is identifying expert teachers as respondents. The results could help researchers better understand teachers digital text competences as a resource in the classroom, from a teacher point of view. The findings from this study will then be explored further in the following design-based studies.

During the roundtable, I would like to discuss the possibilities and limitations of the Delphi-study and, if possible, also discuss the interrelations between my theoretical perspectives.