Reimagining faculty development for the digital classroom: Teacher educators' constructions of sustainable TPACK growth in Punjab

Abstract

While teacher education in Pakistan is generally faced with various limitations pertaining to technology infrastructure, teachers' continuous training, and institutional support, integration of technology in faculty development is an overlooked aspect in Pakistan. This study discusses how the meaning of sustainable growth is built by teacher educators in Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) in the context of Punjab. The study uses a qualitative, descriptive approach with Reflexive Thematic Analysis, which involves semistructured interviews with 25 teacher educators from public sector teacher education institutes. Interviews were transcribed using TurboScribe AI and coded using NVivo AI-assisted coding. Four themes emerged: institutional infrastructures - enabling or constraining; professional identity work in the process of a digital transition; mentoring and collegial learning as sustaining mechanisms; and disciplinary boundaries shaping technology uptake. The results indicate that ensuring the sustainable development of TPACK is not sufficient; it is more likely to be a type of continuous, situated, relationally embedded, and conscious process. The findings provide contextually situated insights into faculty development in a low-resource teacher education system and implications for teacher education policy, mentoring systems, and teacher education leadership. It represents a paradigm shift to view faculty development as a continuous and relational process rather than an event or a separate training session.