Bridging the Educational Technology Gap: Issues of Equity and Access in New York City Teacher Preparation

This dissertation employs the use of primary research, oral history, and narrative and auto-ethnography of my own experiences as a hybrid educator across both systems, and the extant gaps in educational technology, or ed tech, implementation across two of the largest urban public education institutions in the country: the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) and the City University of New York (CUNY). This research unveils the complex web of barriers that hindered the ability for teachers to learn and adopt technologies and the gaps within and between the NYCDOE and CUNY’s teacher preparation priorities regarding ed tech prior to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Using Goodlad’s Theory of Simultaneous Renewal (Goodlad, 1990) of school-university partnerships, a new ed tech-centric partnership model will be explored to ultimately answer the question: How can we create a more equitable and accessible learning environment that would benefit both lower and higher education institutions? The dissertation also explores case studies of partnership models which argue for the need for new ed tech-centric solutions of partnership models specific to the NYCDOE and CUNY’s Simultaneous Renewal of teachers and preservice educators’ ed tech knowledge