Developing AI Competence through AI-TPACK: A Course-Embedded Pathway for Pre-Service Primary English Teachers
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded in educational practice, yet effective teaching use requires teachers to understand AI capabilities and limitations, evaluate AI-generated outputs, connect AI affordances with pedagogical purposes and subject content, and retain professional responsibility for instructional decisions. The TPACK framework provides a basis for understanding such integrated professional knowledge, and recent scholarship has extended it to Intelligent-TPACK or AI-TPACK. However, the literature is more developed in describing and measuring AI-related competence than in specifying how teacher education can systematically develop it. This paper therefore proposes a course-embedded AI literacy development pathway within a Primary English Teaching Methods and Curriculum Theory course, conceptualising AI literacy as a foundational enabling competence for AI-TPACK rather than as a component of it. The pathway consists of five stages: AI awareness, AI tool competence, pedagogical integration, critical and ethical application, and reflective professional development, supported by multi-source formative assessment. The paper contributes by shifting attention from describing what teachers need to know toward considering how such knowledge can be developed through authentic teaching problems. Its effectiveness remains to be established through future empirical implementation.
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