Technology Integration and Higher Education : Comparing Brazilian in-service teachers’ perspectives about the use of technological resources before and during the pandemic

Sammanfattning: Recent research has persistently emphasized that education is broken and that the solutions lie with technological resources in educational institutions and teaching methods (Teräs et al., 2020), which has generated a techno-solutionism approach of Edtech companies (Mirrlees & Alvi, 2019). The outbreak of COVID-19 exposed significant challenges and limitations when adapting education to the digital environment highlighting a need for a deeper understanding of the integration of technology with education. While some scholars focus on technological artefacts as an object of study at the intersection between neuroscience and technology (Healy, 1998), others focus on the importance of pedagogy and the challenges of researching pedagogy in a context of rapidly increasing technological advancement (Hellstén & Reid, 2008).Through investigating Brazilian teachers’ experiences and challenges of integrating technology within higher education before and during the pandemic, the study contributes to furthering understanding of the intersection between pedagogy and technology. The application of an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design contextualizes the teachers’ voices and enables contrast with the existing literature in international contexts. The study’s findings suggest that most of the teachers included technology in their classes to some extent. The teachers’ personal preferences and course discipline, however, can influence how they would incorporate technological resources in higher education. Moreover, the university’s policies and support structures also influence teachers’ decisions and motivations regarding technology integration. The study recontextualized the growing discussion in global research surrounding education and technology by using prominent scholars in the field to form a foundation through which to understand if similar issues may also appear in the Brazilian context. The main differences in the findings of this research set the case of Brazil apart in that the teachers noticed that the course discipline can be a factor in deciding whether or not to use technological resources in their classes at Brazilian institutions. The discussion about the course discipline did not appear in the international literature review focusing on technology-enhanced learning and teachers’ attitudes toward technology integrations. Moreover, this research facilitated the creation of the Inverted Mirror instrument, which was developed during the literature review process to create a visualization of comparisons. The Inverted Mirror instrument is used here to compare and visualize what is unseen or hidden during the comparison of teacher experiences in order to explain what occurs when technology is used in the classroom.