Elementary Pre-service Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Digitized Visual Primary Sources in the Social Studies

This qualitative study examined the attitudes of elementary pre-service teachers toward using digitized visual primary sources in the social studies. Specifically, the researcher attempted to answer the following questions:

1. What are elementary pre-service teachers’ attitudes toward incorporating digitized visual primary sources in social studies instruction prior to a workshop?

2. To what extent if any, does exposure to strategies using digitized visual primary sources affect elementary pre-service teachers’ attitudes?

3. How, if at all, do elementary pre-service teachers think that digitized visual primary sources should be used after a workshop.

Data for this qualitative study consisted of pre and post workshop questionnaires, reflection prompts, and the researcher’s journal reflections. These data were collected before, during and after a workshop that trained elementary pre-service teachers in many aspects of teaching and learning with digitized visual primary sources that included four research-based strategies.

The researcher drew four conclusions from this study. First, teacher-training workshops can help pre-service teachers transform their beliefs in relation to how best to use digitized visual primary sources. Second, the participants remained optimistic about their beliefs in the benefits in using digitized visual primary sources, while challenges of time to scaffold became apparent in the workshop. The third conclusion was that pre-service teachers were motivated by current, innovative, and technology based teaching strategies with digitized visual primary sources such as creating memes or document analysis strategies. Fourth, the participants perceived obstacles with perspective taking and detecting bias strategies that are sensitive in nature.