Pedagogical Professionalization in Digital Contexts

The promotion of pedagogical professionalization is central for quality teaching and for the development of a teacher’s professional identity. This paper deals with the question of how a comprehensive pedagogical training program for teacher education supporting twenty-first century teaching and learning in Cambodian and Sri Lankan primary schools can be designed, including the pedagogically effective use of digital resources. For this purpose, pedagogical professionalization is first examined theoretically and related to the requirement structures of teacher education. Subsequently, the role of digital technologies in pedagogical professionalization processes is discussed. The core of this article consists of the presentation of the online course developed in the EU co-funded Capacity Building in Higher Education project CONTESSA – Contemporary Teaching Skills for South Asia. This open educational resource (OER) course offers a pedagogical teacher education program based on learner-centered, constructivist perspective following Dewey (1916), Kember (2009) and Hoidn (2017). In addition to theoretical approaches, the CONTESSA modules include a multifaceted methodological repertoire that enables a theory-based, practice-oriented and (self-)reflective examination within the framework of pedagogical professionalization processes.