Questioning the character and significance of convergence between social network and professional practices in teacher education

This paper captures and characterises the interplay between a group of student teachers’ narratives of social network practice and their emergent professional practice with technologies. Teachers on an Initial Teacher Education programme in the UK spent a semester studying a module that synthesised university-based lectures with a professional intervention using online communications technologies in a local primary school involving a class of 30 children (8–10 years). A narrative methodology was developed to capture and conceptualise the teachers’ perceptions of the experience. Teachers’ dispositions towards the appropriation of technologies were found to be as ubiquitous across social network and professional contexts as the technological tools themselves. However, the distinctly nuanced ways in which the teachers experienced the process of convergence raises questions with regard to the significance of such convergence and how we both capture and characterise convergence as a technological, cultural or agent-centred process. The findings support the need for an agent-centred view of convergence embedded within the wider socio-cultural ecology that incorporates individuals’ engagement with media and social network practices.