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Objectives and Purposes
The objective of our research is to explore how authentic technology use and teacher inquiry may coalesce within the context of a semester-long, curriculum-based, technology-enhanced field experience. During the field experience a preservice (i.e. prospective) teacher collaborates with an inservice (i.e. practicing) teacher to integrate technology in the curriculum. This research is part of a 3-year ongoing effort to provide our preservice teachers with authentic experiences related to using technology in K-5 classrooms. During our session we will share: (1) relevant background information about K-12/university partnerships, (2) specific information about how we integrated this research into our curriculum-based, technology-enhanced field experiences, (3) a brief overview of how we used teacher inquiry to help preservice teachers systematically study their experiences, (4) the results of our research and supporting artifacts, (5) suggestions for how our results can be used to improve efforts to prepare preservice teachers to use technology, (6) our plans for furthering our research and (7) an open forum for comments and questions.

Significance
While teacher inquiry is widely recognized in the general teacher education literature, use of this strategy in curriculum-based, technology-enhanced field experiences is novel. In fact, a literature search in AACE’s digital library, ISTE’s CARET resource, SITE proceedings (years 2000 to 2004) and WebLuis revealed relatively few citations that included both teacher inquiry and technology-related field experiences. Of these citations, none conceptualized teacher inquiry as we have in our study. With little research focused on the intermingling of teacher inquiry and technology-based field experiences, our research provides a new lenses through which to consider technology-related field experiences.

Perspective or Theoretical Framework
Our research is grounded in the two primary perspectives. First, our efforts espouse John Goodlad’s concept of simultaneous renewal (1970), the belief that teacher preparation programs and K-12 schools work together to concurrently improve the education of prospective teachers, inservice teachers, and K-12 students. Second, our efforts espouse Dana and Silva’s model of teaching as inquiry (2003). Within this model, the process of teacher inquiry involves prospective or practicing teachers defining a “wondering” or “burning question” that emerges from their practice, developing a research plan for data collection through such mechanisms as journals, student work, interviews with students, and field notes, analyzing their collective data in relationship to their wondering to develop a picture of their learning, taking action to implement what was learned through their investigation, and sharing the results of their work with other professionals.

Research Methods
Our participants were prospective teachers enrolled in the curriculum-based, technology-enhanced field experience semester. Each participant was in the final semester of our ProTeach (Professional Teacher) program, had completed their student teacher experience during the previous semester and selected “interdisciplinary integration of educational technology” as their specialization area.

Data Collection: We collected student artifacts (including weekly e-updates, reflections and products created by our prospective teachers, their inservice partners and the K-12 students), students’ inquiry papers, and instructor journals.

Data Analysis: The purpose of our analysis was exploration and the data collection methods presented above are recommended for an exploratory study (Krathwohl, 1993). Both researchers read through the entire data set independently to get a sense of the data set as a whole and began to sort the data into relevant and meaningful categories (Tesch, 1990). We then looked for additional evidence to either support or refute these categories using a version of the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).

Results or Expectations
Our results were consistent with studies of these field experiences prior to the use of teacher inquiry. Improved attitudes toward technology integration, increased technical and pedagogical skills, expanded repertoire of classroom management strategies, and opportunities to connect theory to practice were among the commonalities (Dawson, 2004; Dawson, 2000). However, the use of teacher inquiry resulted in more broadly-based benefits previously unseen during these experiences. In particular these prospective teachers demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the purposes of using technology in the classroom, of the complexity associate with teaching (and using technology) in a classroom and of the multiple relationships between teachers and students in the classroom. In a nutshell, our findings suggest that the addition of teacher inquiry to our technology-related field experiences, helped temper the tendency to focus on “doing” and put the focus on technology role’s within the larger context of a teaching and learning in the classroom.

Implications for Practice
Field experiences are a hallmark of teacher education programs (Conant, 1963; McIntyre, 1996). In the field of educational technology, national agencies advocate the use of field experiences to help prepare teachers to integrate technology in their classrooms (Thomas, 1999; USDOE, 2001; NCATE, 1997; American Council of Education, 1999). Our research presents a novel combination of technology-related field experiences and teacher inquiry. Prospective teachers are prepared to view technology in the larger context of teaching and learning in the classroom. In our presentation, we will specifically address the implications our research has for teacher educators and facilitate a discussion related to the future directions of our research.