The search for professional digital competence in Swedish teacher education – a qualitative multi-level project

Today´s Swedish society is permeated with digital technology including complex streams of (dis)information that may be algorithm-driven. This will require by young people to develop the digital competence needed to exercise their digital citizenship.

The aim in this project between the years 2025-2028 is to explore, analyse and understand how Swedish teacher education, as institutions and in practice, creates conditions and supports student teachers to develop a professional digital competence (PDC) to allow them as newly qualified teachers to arrange digital infused teaching and learning practices and forming necessary educational incentives in school for students to develop adequate digital competence in the light of the embeddedness of digital technology in almost all aspects of being a societal citizen.

Data will be collected from vice-chancellors at a Swedish teacher education faculty management level, from teacher educators and from student teachers before and after practice placement in schools.

The project will use a four-dimensional theoretical lens of PDC for analyses: (1) Generic digital competence; (2) Subject-didactic digital competence; (3) Profession-related digital competence; and (4) Transformative digital competence.

Results will fill an important knowledge gap in this field of research and provide evidence-based recommendations for how teacher education can support the development of student teachers’ PDC needed to work in the digitalised Swedish school.