Maria Høegh Beierholm

Research and development areas

One of our most important and significant educational tasks is to prepare our children and young people to move beyond the role of consumers of digital technology. We must promote digital empowerment and the courage to act, so that all young people – regardless of gender or social background – have the opportunity to engage critically and constructively with digital technology.

Technology comprehension in teacher education and primary school

We are currently in the process of developing the new teaching subject technology comprehension in the teacher education program in Aarhus. Through the interplay of coding and decoding digital artifacts, we aim to enable student teachers to become digitally empowered so that they are prepared to support pupils’ technology comprehension and digital empowerment in primary school. Didactically, we work with design approaches, playful learning, tinkering, and entrepreneurship pedagogy.

Entrepreneurship pedagogy and digital empowerment

At VIA Student Innovation Houses, I develop courses where professional students work hands-on with different digital technologies. The purpose is to strengthen their digital initiative and imagination in a way that allows them to innovate their practice. The overarching educational goal is to strengthen welfare professionals’ courage and ability to use/create technologies in their professions for what they want – and not the other way around.

In the courses, we explore questions such as:

• What can the technology do, and what do I want to use it for?

• How do you program? We create small “silly inventions” using, for example, micro:bits.

• How can you produce sound that affects the listener? We make podcasts.

• How do I use AI in creative processes? We brainstorm and co-create with language models.

• How do you edit effective videos? We produce videos.

• How can I explain abstract content simply through stop motion? We create stop motion videos.

• How can we create XR-technological solutions that others can use? We build interactive environments that can be experienced in VR or AR.

Flipped learning

How can I increase the quality of the limited face-to-face time I have with my students? We learn when we experiment and experience. Therefore, the time we have with our students must be used optimally. By moving the dissemination part into the preparation phase, time is freed for experimental hands-on teaching. Students therefore acquire knowledge through high-quality homemade instructional videos and podcasts. Preparation in teacher education should be more than just reading texts, and class time should be used for exploring, questioning, and producing. I would like to investigate the effects of flipped learning in teacher education.

Video observation

How can teachers improve through observation, knowledge sharing, and collegial feedback? Through systematic observation, both teachers and student teachers can gain deeper insights into their own practice. As a lecturer in teacher education, I use students’ video reflections from internships or practice teaching as a starting point for theoretical analysis, where the students decode and analyze their own teaching.

Q-methodology (Q-sort) for systematic exploration of viewpoints

I use this method to examine participants’ attitudes toward a topic. Methodologically, this is done by having them sort a selected number of statements, which are then subject to both qualitative treatment and analysis in the PQ-methods program.