Digital Divide or Digital Opportunity? Pre-Service Teachers' Experiences of Technology-Mediated Global Citizenship Education in Resource-Constrained Contexts

Global Citizenship Education (GCED) has become a key framework for educating students to overcome current challenges worldwide. However, the technology-mediated GCED implementation is highly constrained in resource-limited situations. This interpretative phenomenological study addressed how 15 pre-service teachers experienced technology-mediated GCED during teacher education programme in Punjab, Pakistan. Semi-structured telephonic interviews have shown the first-hand experience of managing the severe constraints imposed by the inadequate infrastructure, institutional contradictions, and pedagogical ambiguity, with the discovery of new workarounds and building critical awareness of digital equity. Three group experiential themes were identified: (1) experiencing digital deprivation as pedagogical contradiction, (2) reconstructing technological agency through resourcefulness, and (3) negotiating professional identity between aspirational ideals and material realities. Findings reveal how pre-service teachers construct meaning from technology scarcity, remaking constraints as creativity in pedagogy, while simultaneously internalising anxieties concerning their readiness to teach with technological mediation.