Digital Pedagogical Agency of Preservice Teachers: A Qualitative Study Protocol

This protocol outlines the design of a qualitative study investigating the development of digital pedagogical agency among preservice teachers in South Africa. Digital pedagogical agency refers to the capacity to integrate digital tools into teaching in ways that are both skilful and reflexive, ethically grounded, and contextually responsive. While digital competence frameworks such as TPACK highlight technical and cognitive dimensions, less is known about how preservice teachers actually negotiate digital practices across the diverse and unequal contexts that shape their training. This gap is particularly pressing in South Africa, where structural inequities in digital access complicate teacher preparation.

The study adopts a multisited, multimodal ethnographic design, following preservice teachers across three interconnected sites: their personal and biographical contexts, university-based coursework, and school practicum placements. Data will be generated through participant observation, longitudinal multimodal journalling, and semi-structured interviews. The analysis will be guided by assemblage theory, critical realism, and new materialism, allowing digital pedagogical agency to be understood as an emergent effect of relationships between people, technologies, spaces, and socio-cultural conditions. Reflexive and diffractive thematic analysis will be used to trace the situated practices through which agency is enacted.

By empirically examining how preservice teachers navigate and assemble digital practices across contexts, the study aims to contribute both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, it advances understandings of digital pedagogical agency as distributed, relational, and socio-material. Practically, it seeks to inform teacher education programmes about how best to support preservice teachers in cultivating ethical, reflexive, and adaptive digital practices in a rapidly transforming educational landscape.