Teacher educators’ practices with m-learning: A case study of ‘far transfer’ into schools of practices learned during preservice teacher education

Abstract

A.J. Davis (2017) coined the term ‘far transfer’ in learning as the ability to apply knowledge and skills to novel situations, rather than the knowledge and/or skill that was originally learned, but research evidence of the occurrence of ‘far transfer’ is hard to find. Despite that, the goal of teacher preparation is for student teachers to learn knowledge and skills applicable to their future classrooms and thus ‘far transfer’ is an important goal to achieve. Therefore, today, improving our understanding of how to achieve fruitful ‘far transfer’ of m-learning pedagogies from preservice teacher education into field-based teaching practice in schools is particularly valuable. This paper focuses on our unexpected discovery of the ‘far transfer’ of m-learning pedagogies of a teacher educator, within an overarching instrumental case study of the m-learning practices of eight teacher educators who taught in one or more programmes of preservice teacher education offered by an institution in Aotearoa New Zealand. We conclude that two way ‘far transfer’ is an essential process in Goodlad’s (1994) ‘simultaneous renewal’ of teacher education and schools.