Teachers’ perceptions and practices in relation to the integration of digital technologies in kindergartens in China: an interpretive multi-method study

The present study aimed to provide insights into the integration of digital technologies in the kindergartens of China from the perspectives of teachers, with a specific focus on teachers’ perceptions, pedagogical practices and the multiple contextual factors behind them. Given the focus of the study on the particular context of China, this study did not intend to be representative. The sociocultural ideas developed by Vygotsky were adopted to provide the theoretical bases for this study, whilst the TPACK model (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) and its context framework (Porras-Hernandez & Salinas-Amescua, 2013) were employed to conceptualise some of the research findings. In order to empirically address the research questions regarding participants’ perceptions, practices and their relationships with contexts, this study employed the two-phase interpretive qualitative research design, which included individual interviews of fourteen kindergarten teachers and five case studies with kindergarten teachers and their classrooms in China. In specific, I adopted the case study to deeply understand participating teachers’ pedagogical approaches when integrating digital technologies. The data were generated from individual interviews, classroom observations and document reviews, and then were analysed through the thematic approach and multimodal approach. In particular, both inductive and deductive approach were applied to analyse the data in a reflexive way. This thesis made several empirical and theoretical contributions to the existent knowledge base. Firstly, the findings indicated that the participating teachers tended to foster a greater use of digital technologies for consumption purposes, rather than for creative functions. Secondly, the pedagogical practices of teachers in the present study were interconnected with their understandings of digital technologies and pedagogical beliefs. Thirdly, it was found that teachers’ perceptions and practices were shaped by multiple and interrelated contextual factors, among which the meso-level kindergarten context played a more important role than micro- and macro-level forces. Lastly, the thesis theoretically adapted the context framework for TPACK developed by Porras-Hernandez and Salinas-Amescua (2013) to a networked framework, providing the basis for researchers to study more complex interrelationships between contextual systems in the future.