Professional Training Needs for Digital Pedagogy and Teacherpreneurship: Implications for Teacher Professional Development Curriculum Design

Abstract

Indonesia's elementary school teachers face a preparation gap that is both substantive and structural: digital pedagogy and teacherpreneurship are now practical classroom demands, yet training systems remain misaligned with what practitioners actually need. This study examines that gap from the inside out. Using existential phenomenological inquiry, we engaged 25 elementary school teachers in West Java in semi-structured group interviews, analysed through Colaizzi's descriptive phenomenological method with the Concerns-Based Adoption Model as a sensitising framework. Findings span three concern levels. At the self-concern level, teachers show high awareness of digital transformation alongside fragile professional identity and acute practical-competence gaps, shaped by the absence of structured preparation. At the task-concern level, findings document fragmented, theory-weighted training, infrastructural inequity, and administrative workloads that exclude professional learning from daily routines. At the impact-concern level, teachers recognise digital tools' pedagogical potential and articulate a teacher-generated specification for an integrated training pathway spanning content creation, entrepreneurial practice, financial literacy, and sustainability ethics, while voicing ethical concern about a widening digital divide. These concern-level findings synthesise into two themes answering the study's two research questions: teachers' specification of their own training needs for digital pedagogy and teacherpreneurship, and their account of how those needs should be integrated into curriculum design, teaching materials, and classroom practice. The study concludes that addressing these needs requires reorienting professional development curricula away from episodic, generic provision toward needs-based programme design, differentiated by concern profile, contextually embedded, and calibrated to teachers' own aspirations.