Technological Literacy: A New School Subject Meets Reality

The project investigates how a new subject, Technological Literacy, challenges and strengthens the professional teacher in primary and lower secondary school. The research question raised is: What is needed in order that the subject: Technological Literacy may be implemented in primary and lower secondary school, independent of the teacher's prior technological and digital skills.
Technological Literacy is being introduced across Denmark as trial subject in 46 schools for a period of 3 years. The general aim of the subject is to enhance the development of active, critical and democratic citizens in a digitized society.
More specifically, the new subject comprises a total of four areas of competences:
- Technological Ability to Act, understood as pupils ability to master and understand different digital technologies.
- Digital Empowerment is the ability to understand digital artefacts through analyses and reflection.
- Digital Design and Design Processes focus on the ability to frame problems within complex problem spaces generate new ideas and transform them into digital prototypes.
- Computational Thinking is the ability to frame complex problems that they may be executed by a computer.
To investigate how the teacher's competencies may be developed within the framework of Technology Literacy, we introduce different learning theoretical approaches. The theory of 'Buildung' (formation) is the foundation for understanding the educational perspective on formation that exist in primary and lower secondary education today, and for understanding how digital literacy challenging the educational system. The didactic perspective constitutes the basis for unfolding the pedagogical approach in Technological Literacy and for identifying the consequences for the teacher's didactics. A third perspective included is the OECD report on the 21s century skills which deals with the competencies that are required and will be required by the future society.
With these complementary learning perspective as point departure, we analyse the digital competencies, the teacher needs to acquire, to teach Technological Literacy subjects. This is done through discourse analysis of the ministerial curriculum and teaching plan, and through explorative empirical studies (workshops). The workshops focus on participants´ collaboration and the dialogic process of negotiation of meaning, their common prioritization of concepts and their LEGO constructions.