Pedagogising Virtual Reality Technology: A New Perspective on the TPACK-framework

Digital technology has increasingly influenced all areas of education, including higher education. Not only general communication and collaboration technologies are widely used in all educational areas, but also subject-specific technologies developed for specific professional contexts. Within educational programmes of building construction in higher education, this can, for example, be drawing programmes such as Revit supplemented with Virtual Reality technology, which is the empirical context for this paper.
The development of teachers’ teaching skills can be seen as combinations of different knowledge domains. Here, the so-called PCK (Pedagogical Content Knowledge) research tradition has been quite prominent since its introduction by Schulman (1986), mainly with focus on pre- and primary school areas. Particularly concerning teachers’ competences in technological integration, a special tradition has later developed under the term TPACK (Technological, Pedagogical, And Content Knowledge). This framework was introduced in an article by Mishra and Koehler (2006), in which the authors argued that this area should be highlighted as a third domain due to the growth of digital technology development. Both the PCK and the TPACK tradition are based on the idea that the different domains are integrated or transformed into a new knowledge construct (Kind, 2015; Angeli et al., 2016). The perception of integration/transformation is rooted in a cognitive view of knowledge and learning (Schulman, 2015). However, this has raised some ontological questions about how a ‘knowledge domain’ should actually be understood (Shulman, 2015), and this, in turn, leads to challenges in conceptualising what regulates integration and transformation processes. This has given rise to criticism and discussion, both internally from the research field, but also from other sides, e.g. educational sociology fields. Howard and Maton (2011) have argued that the three knowledge domains in TPACK – though they identify important content areas – are locked in their empirical context. According to the authors, there is a lack of concepts for determining what forms knowledge takes; i.e. forms that can be compared across empirical contexts.
In order to identify some underlying principles of how knowledge practices are structured, the so-called specialisation codes from ‘Legitimation Code Theory’ (LCT) can be employed (Maton, 2014). Specialisation codes are about the ‘basis of achievement’; i.e. what counts as legitimate knowledge and what constitutes a legitimate ‘knower’ in a specific setting. A distinction is made between two sets of principles/dimensions: ‘epistemic relations’ and ‘social relations’. The former deals with the significance of epistemological matters such as possessing specialist procedures, methods and techniques related to the subject matter. ‘Social relations’ deals with the significance of personal traits/characteristics of the ‘knower’, whether such traits are innate or come from belonging to social groups (Bourdieu, 1988). The two dimensions can vary independently of each other as continua and thereby form four different code modalities; knowledge code, knower code, elite code and relativist code. These codes make it possible to analyse what dominates teachers’ transformation of knowledge into a pedagogical discourse suitable for students’ learning. The research question that the paper discusses is: How can specialisation codes contribute to conceptualising technological knowledge transformation into pedagogical discourse and thereby complement the TPACK framework? This paper thus proposes an educational sociology perspective on the transformation issue. The empirical work that forms the basis of the argumentation is a case study, which is part of a larger research project comprising a number of UC’s and universities in Denmark. The overall aim was to develop teachers’ digital competences in construction education. The actual case study is about a teacher’s transformation of knowledge about Virtual Reality (VR) to teaching practice in a Constructing Architect program (CA-program).