Catering for Student Digital Competence - Teachers navigating the complexities of digital-infused education

Abstract

There have been massive investments in school digitalization worldwide, which have led to high policy expectations for potential outcomes, one being that students will be able to use digital technologies and understand their consequences. Thus, the thesis aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how teachers make sense of student digital competence and how it is catered for in digital-infused teaching practices today. For this purpose, teachers’ accounts and enactment, as well as what conditions teachers face, are investigated in three multi-sited ethnographic studies where teachers and other personnel working in 14 primary, lower-secondary, and upper-secondary schools in Sweden participated. Individual and focus group interviews, observations, fieldnotes, informal conversations, texts and walkthroughs generated the data which were qualitatively analyzed using the practice theory of sensemaking. The results indicate that, apart from considering student digital competence as a subject-specific curricular concept, it can additionally be understood as a vague, narrow, technical-instrumental and cross-curricular one. Teachers individually and differently cater for cross-curricular aspects, that is, technical aspects, source criticism and how students can avoid dangers in relation to digital technologies. In almost every lesson, teachers dedicate time to instructing their students in how to navigate digital platforms for schoolwork, which is why a new, tacit, and cross-curricular school subject of platform bureaucratization was identified. The expectations expressed in policies in relation to participation in a digital-infused society, for example, digital rights, participation, engagement, and critical resistance, legislative and ethical aspects, as well as data- and AI-literacies, are not as visible, and few teachers consider it their task to attend to these aspects. The identified constraining conditions relate to policies and prevailing discourses, school development strategies, digital technologies, and how students’ digital-infused out-of-school activities are made sense of. The practical and pedagogical implications let bottom-up and top-down perspectives meet, since the implications involve teachers, school leaders and facilitators such as school librarians and ICT advisors, and transnational and national stakeholders.