Digital process integration in vocational teacher education (DiPoLe)
The digital transformation is changing professions at a pace that poses major challenges for vocational schools - and consequently for vocational teacher education. The project 'DiPoLe' does not consider digital transformation as a primarily technological challenge; rather, it understands digital transformation as a profound economic-social change that fundamentally questions the processes of vocational education, the professional attitude of vocational teachers, and the way we do teacher education.
In addition to challenges, the digital transformation also offers great opportunities to take vocational teacher training a decisive step further. After all, digitization is an issue that affects all key stakeholder groups - schools, companies, university lecturers and students - in equal measure and provides an opportunity to work together on a future-proof design of teacher education. DiPoLe is concerned with establishing processes of exchange and cooperation between the central actors in vocational education and training in the sense of continuous course development. DiPoLe is based on three guiding principles:
1. Vocational teacher training must become more integrative: Digitization is not just a matter of future teachers learning a few media didactic tools and using them in the classroom. Especially in economics, the digital transformation permeates subject-specific and didactic aspects in equal measure. Teachers must be able to recognize the changes in business processes and make them tangible for their students, and they must be able to didactically process the implications for subject concepts in economics.
2. Vocational teacher education must become more dynamic: Teachers in vocational education have always been required to keep abreast of developments in business practice. The dynamics of change have picked up speed due to the digital transformation, but at the same time digitization also offers new opportunities to dynamically develop content beyond the (static) textbook. The corresponding competencies of future teachers must already be actively promoted during their studies.
3. Vocational teacher training must become more cooperative: The requirement that the various learning venues cooperate in the delivery of vocational education and training is firmly anchored in the Vocational Training Act (BBiG §2). At the same time, learning location cooperation still represents one of the major challenges of vocational education and training today. The digital transformation offers opportunities to engage in more intensive dialog than before.
Based on these three guiding principles, DiPoLe aims at a comprehensive integration of the topic 'digital transformation' in the study program "Business Education: Teacher Training at Vocational Colleges" at the University of Paderborn. However, the sustainable development of study programs at universities is often a challenging process - given the fragmented structure of teacher training programs, this is even more true for teacher education. For this very reason, DiPoLe strives for a cooperative interaction of many actors within the university as well as at schools and in companies. Only in this way will students be able to recognize digitization as a thematic as well as didactic-methodical thread throughout the entire course of study.
