‘What we wanted to do was to change the situation’ - Distance teacher education as stimulation for school development in Iceland

Abstract

The article describes the origin of a distance programme for teachers first offered at the Iceland University of Education in 1993 in response to a lack of qualified teachers in rural Iceland. Student teachers were teaching in their home districts while enrolled in the programme, which was organized as a combination of campusbased sessions and home study, communicating with university lecturers via the Internet. The purpose of the article is to enhance understanding of the inception of the programme and shed light on the way in which student teachers’ participation in the distance programme enabled them to stimulate school development. Document analysis reveals the importance of the interaction of different factors in Icelandic society when the distance programme was taking shape. A description of the first steps in the development of the new teacher education model from the perspective of student teachers is based on data generated from interviews with three former distance students during visits to rural schools. Expansive learning theory (Engeström, 1987; Engeström & Sannino, 2010) was used as a theoretical framework for analysis and interpretation. The distance programme is looked at as an innovation in teacher education responding to a persistent lack of qualified teachers in rural regions. The findings suggest that an important factor in facilitating the inception of the programme was the collective responsibility of agents at different points within the school system in the rural districts collaborating with the Iceland University of Education. From the student teachers’ perspective, lack of contact with lecturers was a challenge they learned to overcome by forming networks to collaborate, share knowledge and experience and support one another. This development was increasingly mediated by use of the Internet and is suggested to have been an important contribution to the emerging new model of distance teacher education. It is claimed that the schoolbased distance students brought new knowledge from the programme into their schools, thereby contributing to school development.