Entrypoints for Integrating Computing and Tech into Teacher Education: Addressing Problems and Opportunities with the EnCITE Framework

To coherently integrate computing and digital technology into teacher education, stakeholders at teacher preparation institutions must grapple with a complex landscape of problems and opportunities. This paper’s literature review maps that landscape into problems and opportunities that are (1) technological, (2) pedagogical, definitional / (3) ideological, (4) political, and (5) developmental in nature. While existing frameworks respond to particular aspects of these areas (e.g. the popular TPACK framework zooms in on technological and pedagogical questions), stakeholders engaged in curricular planning must think more holistically about how to prepare future teachers. We share EnCITE (Entrypoints to Computing Integrated Teacher Education), a framework that indexes all five areas as it positions pre-service teachers as learners and teachers about, with, through, and against technology and computing. We share examples from our practice steering an initiative to integrate computing and digital literacies into teacher education at a large urban university system in the Northeast of the U.S, to illustrate how teacher educators with diverse backgrounds can use EnCITE to orient to a complex landscape and to imagine curricular possibilities that can respond to those challenges.