Constructionism, an extension of Jean Piaget’s theory of constructivism, is a learning theory and a design method for education, first developed by Seymour Papert in the 1980s. Though it shares aspects with constructivism, such as valuing the creation of knowledge structures during learning, it differentiates itself primarily with its insistence on the importance of creating tangible artefacts or objects to aid in learning (Papert & Harel 1991). These objects, which can be exchanged and discussed among learners, are integral to this learning method. Built on the belief that learners are creators of their knowledge, constructionism insists that learning is particularly effective when the learner is engaged in building learning artefacts or tools that they find personally significant ‘whether it is as simple as a sandcastle, or as complex as a universe theory’ (Papert & Harel 1991:1). Papert and Harel present these artefacts as ‘objects to think with’ and argue that they promote solid, tangible methods of learning and understanding different concepts.

Moreover, constructionism promotes manipulative and interactive engagement with these objects. Having the capacity to experiment with these objects, to refine and adjust them repeatedly, facilitates a concrete reasoning style (Levin, Semenov & Gorsky 2025). Loseke (2024) contends that such manipulation of artefacts transforms the learning process into an iterative and cumulative one, accommodating both planning and learning styles. This gives rise to what Alimisis and Kynigos (2009:18) coined as ‘epistemological pluralism’. This suggests that when learners manipulate objects and repeatedly refine their work, they develop knowledge in ways that are personally meaningful and cognitively diverse. Butler and Leahy (2021) opine that technology can serve as a tool for implementing constructionism. It creates a platform in which teachers, including pre-service teachers as learners, can easily build, manipulate and share their artefacts digitally, thereby strengthening the experiential aspect of learning within this theory. Furthermore, Benjakul (2023) demonstrated the potential of constructionist instructional design in promoting the development of technology knowledge, a key 21st-century teacher competency.

Constructionism stresses the importance of social interaction in learning, signifying engaging activities, such as creating, constructing or coding, enable learners to produce tangible objects for others to assess (Papert & Harel 1991), thereby enriching the learning context. The objects crafted by learners serve as mediators, involving others in their cognitive processes while simultaneously allowing learners to accumulate diverse perspectives through discussions. Consequently, this pedagogical approach links tangible knowledge with abstract concepts and facilitates interaction between individual and collective intellectual realms (Rob & Rob 2018). The process of knowledge construction in a collective setting occurs when there is an effective blend of tangible objects produced by learners and a common comprehension evolved through successive sequences of symbolisation and interpretation. Collaborative dialogue about an individual’s or another person’s object promotes collective understanding, laying the groundwork for novel insights. Therefore, constructionism delineates a dual-building process, ‘the creation of tangible objects and the development of new interpretations’ (Papert & Harel 1991:8).

This study positions constructionism as a framework that makes the negotiation of TPACK visible. In this intervention, PGCE pre-service teachers were engaged in designing technology-integrated lesson plans and micro-teaching sessions. The assumption was that the design process is not smooth. It inherently involves confronting challenges and making difficult choices. As they design their lessons, pre-service teachers have to decide how to represent content, which pedagogical approach to use, and how to incorporate technology. These decisions could reveal tensions, such as a conflict between a technology’s appeal and its pedagogical value or between the desire to cover content and the time required for technology-assisted exploration.

These tensions in this study, however, are not endpoints but catalysts for development. The constructionist practice of creating artefacts for social discussion (Kynigos 2015) meant that these points of conflict were not faced alone. When a lesson plan was shared or a micro-teaching session was conducted, the inherent tensions in the design became topics for collective dialogue. Peers and teacher educators could question choices, propose alternatives and share their own struggles. This dialogue, centred on a concrete artefact, allowed for a shared negotiation of the problems that arise at the intersection of technology, pedagogy and content.

Therefore, in this study, constructionism is used not just for creating teaching materials, but also as an intervention to create a context in which TPACK tensions are expected to emerge. The creation of an artefact makes these tensions concrete, and the collaborative dialogue around it provides a structured way for pre-service teachers to navigate and reconcile them, potentially leading to a more integrated and practical form of TPACK.

The research was conducted at a university in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, involving 20 pre-service teachers (PSTs) from the Postgraduate Certificate in Education programme. This 1-year programme prepares graduates whose first degree is not in education to become teachers, with each student specialising in two school subjects: one subject for grades 7 to 9 (the Senior Phase, SP) and another for grades 10 to 12 (the Further Education and Training [FET] Phase). A core component is the mandatory ‘Teaching with Technology’ module, which was redesigned in 2024 around a constructionist approach to serve as the intervention for this study. The module’s design was informed by the TPACK framework (Mishra & Koehler 2006) and constructionist theory (Papert & Harel 1991), with the objective of helping pre-service teachers develop and understand the connections between technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge. The learning goal of the module was to introduce pre-service teachers to the TPACK domains and to support them in developing their own understanding through direct experience, classroom dialogue and micro-teaching with technology.

To achieve this, the module’s activities were centred on the collaborative creation of tangible artefacts. The 20 pre-service teachers were divided into four groups of five members. Each group was tasked with designing one technology-integrated lesson plan (concrete artefact) that would demonstrate their initial TPACK choices. To make the learning experience relevant, all tasks were connected to the SP and FET phase subject topics of their choice, which the pre-service teachers would soon be teaching. The module provided access to a range of technological resources, such as virtual learning environments and gamification technologies, to encourage interest-based and collaborative work. The main activities required pre-service teachers to actively construct and test their understanding. This was followed by a 50-min micro-teaching session in which they presented their lesson to peers (simulated as SP and FET learners), effectively testing their design in a simulated classroom context, making their TPACK choices visible and open to peer feedback. These constructionist activities, designing and testing an artefact, were chosen specifically to surface the practical challenges of integration, requiring groups to debate and reconcile different approaches to content, pedagogy and technology.

Furthermore, each group wrote a single reflection journal documenting their negotiation processes. These reflections focused explicitly on their group interactions and how they made decisions when conflicts or synergies arose between the knowledge domains. This sequence of collaborative design, practical testing and structured reflection formed a complete cycle for investigating how constructionist practices mediate the negotiation of TPACK.

This study used a qualitative research approach to investigate the processes through which pre-service teachers negotiate the relationships between technology, pedagogy and content. A qualitative design was selected for its capacity to provide an in-depth understanding of complex human experiences and the meanings participants assign to them (Creswell & Creswell 2017; Merriam & Grenier 2019). This approach was particularly well-suited to capturing the in-depth, dialogic nature of knowledge negotiation as pre-service teachers engaged in constructionist activities.

Data collection was designed to gather rich evidence of this negotiation process from multiple complementary methods. A purposive sampling strategy was employed at the cohort level (Creswell & Creswell 2017). Although the ‘Teaching with Technology’ module is a compulsory component of the PGCE programme, the specific constructionist intervention and redesigned curriculum were implemented solely within one intact class of 20 pre-service teachers taught by the researcher. This cohort was selected purposefully as an information-rich, bounded case, as they were uniquely positioned to articulate the phenomenon of TPACK negotiation, being the only group actively engaged in the collaborative artefact creation and micro-teaching cycles central to the research question.

Moreover, to capture the dialogic nature of their collective reasoning, the same 20 participants were divided into two focus groups of 10. The two-group focus discussion setting was chosen specifically to stimulate collaborative dialogue, creating a forum where participants could articulate, challenge and refine their understandings of TPACK together, thereby making their collective negotiation visible. Alongside these discussions, a reflective journal from each of the project groups of five members each was collected. These journals contained guided prompts that directly asked groups to document and critically examine their decision-making, focusing explicitly on the tensions and synergies they encountered between content, pedagogy and technology during their lesson planning and micro-teaching. This provided a recorded account of their internal group negotiation.

Furthermore, the author, who also served as the module lecturer, conducted direct observations of all micro-teaching sessions. These observations offered critical contextual data, revealing how the TPACK understandings developed during collaborative planning were translated into teaching practice and where new, unanticipated tensions arose in the simulated classroom environment. Together, this multi-faceted approach, capturing peer dialogue, written group reflection and observed practice, enabled a comprehensive exploration of how TPACK is negotiated through constructionist learning experiences.

The data analysis adopted a typological analysis framework (Abu-Bakar et al. 2024) to identify and organise key themes and patterns within the data (Stephen 2024). This approach was selected specifically to categorise the different types of tensions and synergies that emerged as pre-service teachers designed and taught their micro lessons. The initial coding structure was informed by core TPACK and constructionism concepts, providing a lens to identify initial instances of negotiation within the data.

The analysis followed an iterative process to ensure the findings were closely aligned with the participants’ experiences. After initial coding, the developed categories were rigorously re-examined. This involved not only verifying that the data supported the categories but also actively searching for data that contradicted them or offered alternative perspectives on how negotiations unfolded. This deliberate focus on divergent cases is essential for developing a robust and credible account of a complex social process like knowledge negotiation (Creswell & Poth 2018). The analysis remained flexible, allowing for the modification of existing categories and the creation of new ones directly from the data, such as when a specific type of tension not found in the initial literature was identified.

Ethical clearance to conduct this study was obtained from the Rhodes University Faculty of Education Research Ethics Committee. The ethical clearance number is 2023-7281-7741. All participants provided informed consent, confirming their voluntary participation and comprehension of the study’s objectives and procedures. To ensure anonymity, participants were assigned pseudonyms (PST1 to PST20), and groups were assigned numbers (Group 1 to Group 4). The research was conducted in accordance with ethical guidelines and with strict adherence to participant privacy and confidentiality.

The negotiation of TPACK tensions first emerged during the concrete task of artefact creation. As the pre-service teachers began designing their technology-integrated lesson plans, the practical demands of the task revealed points of misalignment between their technological choices, pedagogical intentions and content objectives. This act of design functioned as a diagnostic process, bringing to the surface specific incongruences that had remained latent during earlier, more abstract discussions of the TPACK. These incongruences included a conflict between a technology’s surface appeal and its limited capacity to address higher-order content demands, as well as a tension between the time required for meaningful technology use and the imperative to cover the topic selected by the group. Consequently, the lesson plan became more than a completed assignment; it served as a concrete record of the fundamental tensions inherent in technology integration, making these challenges visible and available for subsequent collaborative examination.

Groups selected technology based on familiarity or novelty, only to discover during the design process that the technology did not directly support the learning objective. For instance, Group 4, passionate about using a popular quiz application for a poetry lesson, found it was a poor fit for helping learners analyse complex symbolism. The group reflection noted:

This was not an isolated case, as Group 1, designing a history lesson, shared a similar realisation in their reflection:

These experiences reveal that a primary challenge is not a lack of technology knowledge and skills, but rather the difficulty of evaluating the pedagogical congruence of a technology with the conceptual demands of the content.

The findings also established tension arising from the practical constraints of the classroom, particularly the conflict between desired technology use and the realities of instructional time and the additional cognitive load imposed on learners. As pre-service teachers mapped out their lessons, they recognised that the mental effort required for learners to master the operational features of technology (virtual laboratory) would compete directly with the mental effort needed to grasp the intended disciplinary concepts. The design of the artefact forced groups to move from a theoretical list of activities to a timed 50 min micro-teaching, sequential plan. In doing so, they repeatedly confronted the fact that sophisticated technology integration often requires time that competes with content coverage. In their journal reflection, Group 3 and Group 2 captured this dilemma, stating:

This challenge of coverage versus depth in a technology-rich context was a common thread. This finding shows that an important part of TPACK is the pragmatic ability to make strategic trade-offs, recognising that the most pedagogically sound technology may be impractical within a given context. The task of designing the lesson plan demonstrates that the artefact served as a catalyst, transforming abstract knowledge domains into concrete, practical challenges. It forced pre-service teachers to move beyond simply choosing a technology to critically examining its purpose, a process that consistently surfaced specific, actionable tensions between the appealing, the pedagogical and the practical. This initial stage of revelation, where non-pedagogical challenges were made visible and tangible, formed the essential raw material for all subsequent negotiation.

The tensions revealed through artefact creation did not remain static challenges; they became the root of a dynamic process of social negotiation. The collaborative structure of the tasks, particularly the group design work and the micro-teaching feedback sessions, created a forum where these initial conflicts were articulated, debated and progressively resolved. This dialogue functioned as a mechanism that transformed individual cognitive dissonance into a collective, integrated understanding. It was in these exchanges that the separate domains of TPACK began to coalesce.

A key discursive strategy observed was pedagogical reasoning aloud, where participants explicitly justified their technological choices in terms of learning outcomes. This moved the discussion beyond personal preference to a shared evaluation of pedagogical soundness. For example, during group discussion, PST 16 and PST 7 recounted a group debate:

Through this process of challenging and justifying, the group collectively forged a stronger, more deliberate connection between technology, pedagogy and content. Furthermore, when groups encountered practical obstacles, they engaged in collective troubleshooting, pooling their knowledge to find solutions that reconciled technological, pedagogical and content constraints. This involved using technology or finding a new one altogether.

Moreover, as Group 1 designed a geography lesson, they struggled with how to make complex climate data accessible. Their journal reflection detailed the process:

This exemplifies how a synergistic solution emerged from shared problem-solving. PST 12 expressed during the focus group discussion how this collective effort was crucial:

The negotiated dialogue led to compromise through exemplification, in which proposing a concrete example or alternative broke the deadlock and created a new, shared vision for the lesson. Abstract arguments about principles were settled by visualising practical application.

The carefully negotiated plans from the design phase met their test in the micro-teaching sessions. This enactment of the lesson plan artefact represented a critical transition from theoretical agreement to embodied practice, serving as a crucible in which abstract TPACK understanding was actualised in real-time teaching. The simulated classroom became a space where new, unforeseen tensions emerged, and where the planned synergies were either validated or fell apart, demanding a different form of negotiation, one of agile adaptation.

The findings show that technologies that were chosen for their clear pedagogical value in theory sometimes created unexpected cognitive load or procedural confusion in practice. PST 11 and PST 20 conveyed this during the focus group discussion:

These moments were important, forcing a recognition that the understanding of a technology’s integration is its effect on the learner’s engagement with the content during the flow of instruction. Similarly, the micro-teaching environment also produced unplanned, emergent synergies. In the dynamic interplay between teacher, student and technology, pre-service teachers discovered new, more effective integration strategies that had not been conceived during their planning. PST 9 described this spontaneous discovery:

The micro-teaching experience was not a performance of a finalised plan, but rather the final, essential stage of the negotiation process. It provided the contextual pressure that solidified the pre-service teachers’ TPACK, transforming it from a consciously held plan into an embodied, adaptable skill set.