Beyond the Digital Journal: Epistemic Conversations in Work- Integrated Learning

Abstract

Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) in teacher education increasingly relies on digital tools, including video-recorded
microteaching platforms and online reflective journals, to support and assess pre-service teachers' professional
development. This paper examines whether such digital infrastructure produces deeper epistemic engagement or merely
reproduces the same compliance-oriented reflection long associated with paper-based journalling. Drawing on a qualitative
comparative case study of Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) programmes at two Western Cape Higher Education
Institutions, the study analysed semi-structured interviews and reflective journal entries generated from twenty participants
across four stakeholder groups: PGCE students, method lecturers, Work-Integrated Learning coordinators, and school-based
mentor teachers. Shulman's Pedagogical Reasoning and Action Model and Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field, and capital
served as theoretical anchors, allowing the analysis to examine both the cognitive work supported by digital tools and the
structural conditions determining whether that work was realised in practice. Digital platforms, chiefly private online video
channels used to record and revisit microteaching sessions, did create genuine opportunities for sustained self-monitoring
and, in a smaller number of cases, collaborative dialogue between students, going beyond what paper-based methods alone
could offer. Yet this technological layer sat apart from the reflective journal itself, which kept functioning as an individual,
retrospective, compliance-driven artefact whatever format it took. Time pressure, limited prior teaching exposure, and
journal designs built around assessment rather than dialogue showed up as barriers whether students worked on paper or
online. The paper argues that the missing layer in online reflective practice is not technological capacity but epistemic
architecture: digital tools were not designed, and are not currently used, to convert recorded experience into the kind of
dialogic, theory-connected conversation that produces professional learning. The single strongest example of such a
conversation in the data arose from a lecturer's deliberate pedagogical design choice rather than from any inherent
affordance of the technology itself. The paper closes with three recommendations: rebuilding digital reflective infrastructure
around structured epistemic conversations, redesigning journals so they hold fewer but more substantial entries, and
building teacher educators' capacity to facilitate dialogic reflection. None of this follows automatically from installing a digital
repository.