In search of technological pedagogical content knowledge: Teachers' initial foray into podcasting in economics

In this paper, we report on work with eight practicing ninth grade social studies teachers to determine how they chose to integrate podcasting to help their students build on their economic literacy, which includes building both economic concepts and skills. The study is rooted in an interpretivist research paradigm, using the Council for Economic Education's National Voluntary Content Standards in Economics (1997) and Mishra and Koehler's (2006) theory of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) to frame data generation, analysis, and the reporting of results. We found that teachers demonstrated strong technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK) but a lack of technological content knowledge (TCK) in the design and implementation of the podcasting projects. We argue that the lack of teachers' content-based rationale for podcasting is a function of the universal nature of some digital tools, such as podcasting, in contrast to more specialized tools, such as computer simulations.