Summary:

The Swedish government recognises and values foreign academic education and the professional qualifications of its immigrants by allocating resources to programmes that bridge the gap between immigrants’ education and the specific requirements for work in Sweden. These programmes are individually adapted for teachers, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists, social workers, lawyers, engineers, and other professionals. The context of inquiry for this thesis is teachers with a foreign teaching degree, who come from 57 countries or regions and are studying at four Swedish universities. They attend a bridging programme called “Further Education for Foreign Teachers” (in Swedish, Utländska Lärares Vidareutbildning). The purpose of this thesis is to study the unfamiliar ways of thinking and practising teachers with a foreign teaching degree encounter in Swedish teacher education, emphasising digital competence. With this knowledge, we can understand how education can better support diverse groups pedagogically, make the cultural embeddedness of Swedish teacher education more transparent, and plan for authentic competence development. Digital competence is central in Sweden and is part of the teacher education curriculum. Hence, the investigation of what digital competence teachers with a background of migration have is central in this thesis. Five different theoretical frameworks and models are used in this thesis: ways of thinking and practising, redefined transformative learning, the framework of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK), the European Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (DigComp 2.1), and the Digital Competence of Educators framework (DigCompEdu). A convergent mixed methods research design was applied; the combined datasets consisted of: (a) a web survey to which 228 teachers responded; (b) five focus groups with altogether25 teachers; (c) nine individual interviews; (d) 30 reflective texts written by 15 teachers. Findings show that the participants are not a homogenous group and cannot be treated as such. The common ground is that they are foreign-born teachers who have all immigrated to Sweden. The diversity covers a range, from being quite familiar to being unfamiliar with the Swedish educational context. This thesis reveals the diversity of their digital competence, as they score from foundational proficiency levels to highly specialised ones in TPACK as well as in the European framework DigComp 2.1. Furthermore, their expressed digital competence is found within all role descriptors in the European frame-work for the digital competence of educators DigCompEdu, from newcomer to pioneer. Diversity was found in teaching philosophy, understanding of the role of a teacher, view of the pupils , knowledge of how learning occurs, and finally, comprehension of the relationship between education and society. Moreover, the findings highlight that some ways of thinking and practising were unfamiliar to the participants, such as teaching and learning methods, examination practices, roles and expectations from society, further, the communication between teachers and pupils . This has implications for how digital technologies are used for teaching and learning. Unfamiliarity was also found regard-ing both the extent to which society demands digital competence in the curricula and teaching and learning with new pedagogical methods and environ-ments. The participants expressed that their roles as teachers in a new country were unfamiliar and took time to get used too. Therefore, placement supervisors were found to be of great importance for the development of teachers’ digital competence, as they function as mediators and model what it is to be a teacher in Sweden. The analysis shows that all teachers, not only teachers with a mi-grant background, need digital competence at an advanced level to develop digital competence among pupils. Thus, educators must identify unfamiliar ways of thinking and practising, plan for authentic competence development, and address the diversity in digital competence. This thesis contributes to empirical findings, developing tools and models to assist teacher educators to change monocultural teaching to an inclusive practice in which diversity is integrate.

Language: English