The lived experiences of career-change pre-service teachers and the promise of meaningful technology pedagogy beliefs and practice

Career-change pre-service teachers appear to offer more to teaching due to the knowledge, experiences and mindset garnered from previous vocations. How these experiences contribute to this cohort’s technology pedagogy is not well understood. This explanatory case study applied a social cognitive lens to investigate how incumbent technological capabilities, teacher-training and Professional (field) Experience affect career-change pre-service teachers technology integration beliefs and practice. Narratives from semi-structured interviews with 19 career-change pre-service teachers enrolled in graduate-entry teacher-training courses at an Australian university were analysed using a hybrid of deductive and inductive thematic approaches. Technology confidence was linked to previous technological mastery, with associations between curriculum and occupation-specific technology apparent. Past experiences fostered resilience and self-regulation, facilitating second-order control supporting technology integration during Professional Experience. Transmission-oriented pedagogy was buoyed by preconceived beliefs, content knowledge insecurities, and limited mastery and modelling of effective technology during teacher-training. The findings from this study highlight the current deficiencies in graduate-entry teacher education programs from a technological and pedagogical perspective.