The value of Digital for Schooling

As a teacher with digital, I often ponder where digital sits in our schools. It seems still at a stage of value-adding, in many ways not dissimilar to when I started many eons ago. Over the journey I have had the chance to research this and found that while the potential for digital as a personal learning environment for meta-cognitive empowerment can be achieved, school structures of closed knowledge and standardised testing take precedence, and in doing so limit and undermine potential.

Of significance is the increase in the personal integration of digital, particularly through smartphones and a digital-fused interconnected world. This is where the greatest gap is evident.

This is not saying we should stop trying. I have been fortunate to have had many opportunities in this area and there are steps that any school can work through. I am also dedicated to a liberal subject base, but not as an end to themselves. For me authentic application and creativity framed around the question “What can you make or do with that learning?” is needed to empower students and schools to be able to look further than just exam scores.

Of course there have been many changes over the duration, not least in the quantity of technology. Media, Web and Mobile developments have all impacted. Student, and then teacher, digital capabilities have progressed, driven more by personal interactions than the haphazard ways acceptable within schools. There has been some integration in administration, although beholden to the system as was. The rate of change of technologies is itself an issue, providing opportunity and an economic challenge. In contemporary times commercialisation as well as data algorithms and controls are impacting.

The enforced school closures shows that we have yet to even reach a basic level of systemic Integration which requires Access for all. This requires overcoming economic and structural inequalities. Only then can we really advance to the second level of Curriculum evolution, which hopefully can underpin a third level of Relevance to the fast changing digital-infused world we inhabit. Of course Access on its own, as Angela McFarlane (2019) points out is insufficient. Systemic reconiderations regarding curriculum, pedagogy, teacher learning and assessment have to go with this. A case in point is schooling’s approach to coding which has changed little over time.

As we work through the virus and enforced school closures, including the value of school as community, there will be both opportunity and challenge to adapt to the changing world of increased distance and digital. Whether schools ‘snap back’ to the world that was, ‘evolve’ to the world that is, or are left somewhere in-between, will be the challenge of our time. Many schools are starting to realise this, although many are also still in a reactionary phase.

In the meantime there will be teachers who will lead by example, and many schools who will wish to highlight higher levels of “success”. Some can afford extra resources supported by marketing to share what’s possible. But schools as a system still regress to the (industrial) base (as clarified in Tyack and Tobin’s Grammar of Schooling (1994)); the educational equivalent of the mathematical regression to the mean.

So we must continue to try, but with the understanding it is within schisms between

Digital in schools valued as an add-on
Digital for personal as integrated
Life and work as increasingly digitally infused.

But to be sure, where there is good education there is hope.

David Tyack and William Tobin. 1994 The “Grammar” of Schooling: Why Has It Been So Hard to Change? American Educational Research Journal. Vol. 31, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 453-479

Angela McFarlane. (2019). Growing up digital: What do we really need to know about educating the digital generation?. London: The Nuffield Foundation.