Any tool works if you are using the language: the role of knowledge in ICT integration in a Johannesburg private school

Abstract

Increasingly teachers are expected to integrate ICTs into their teaching practice. Recent studies have focused on the role played by teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge in explaining how they exploit the affordances offered by the new digital technologies, and yet the pace of integration has been far slower than expected. Education is founded on the business of knowledge, and yet there is a knowledge blindness in educational research. This study tries to discern what effect subject specialization and knowledge has on teacher’s adoption of ICTs into their pedagogical practice, using the framework of Legitimation Code Theory, in particular semantic waves. Seeing ICT practices as affording both knower and knowledge practices, and as affording gravitation or levitation allows us to start to unpack further how the forms knowledge takes influences decisions around ICT adoption.