When I began my doctoral journey five years ago – in 2015 – and I felt almost a gravitational pull to the area of Digital Literacy and Digital Leadership in education, I never could have imagined that in as little as four years after, we would have been faced with a new global reality in terms of the facilitation of learning in digital online spaces. After successfully defending my thesis, I felt very academically energized and commenced almost immediately to write a book which was, in essence, influenced by my study’s findings.
While I did begin writing this book towards the end of 2019, its “prophetic” relevance in 2020, in the wake of the global COVID 19 crisis, has not escaped me and is perhaps more than a tad disconcerting. Entitled Digital Disruption and Caribbean Education: Are We There Yet? this work in progress, seeks to chronicle how the global shift to a digital existence must of necessity not only impact how we navigate Caribbean education systems but also our entire philosophies of learning and leadership. To say that we in the Caribbean have been caught off guard, with our figurative pants down at this juncture of our global history is perhaps a great understatement.
In the Anglophone Caribbean, we have thrived on our colonial and post-colonial approaches to education, which in several respects, have served us well. Our Caribbean territories as developing nations, have bought into the importance of education as a means for upward social mobility. We have come to rely on a form of schooling that was grounded in an elitist-good-school-bad-school-paradigm steeped in a rich, British colonial tradition of Grammar school versus Comprehensive school.
While the innovation and creativity based needs of the technological age are perhaps screaming at us to relinquish these tidy, class-rowed, teacher-centred and predictive rote learning paradigms of the long gone industrial age; in our heads, we have in the Caribbean persisted in holding on for dear life to antiquated models which do not provide the breathing space for true creativity to thrive. Much of this is cushioned by a psychological dependence on notions of exclusive privilege that are traditionally associated with certain school ties; notions that some of us are still afraid to surrender.
We are for the most part independent nations; we have taken our place on the global stage; we continue, some of us, to punch above our weight, yet the hierarchical pecking order among schools in territories like Barbados, continues to define our perceptions of “getting in” or of social admittance to some preferred order that is defined by both school title and school type. We continue on this outdated journey of an analogue way of thinking while the world around us has redefined itself as it seeks to live and thrive in an anomalous and complex digital reality where the rules for judging success have changed. In a very real way, the first hurdle we as a Caribbean people are required to surmount on our quest for 21st Century relevance, is the hurdle of our history and of our socio-cultural realities (Charles, 2019).
Into the midst of this conundrum of educational uncertainty, the COVID 19 pandemic with its resulting upheaval has come and it is forcing us to rethink our educational perspectives and practices. Education in the digital age as a 21st Century reality has moved beyond the earlier obsession with hardware, software and the acquisition of technical skills. Although access to technology and basic technological competencies remains the key entry point to the construct of digital literacy (JISC, 2015; Sharpe and Beetham, 2010), the 21st Century digital citizen is one who demonstrates the higher order cognitive and socio-emotional competencies to be applied to digital use (Eshet, 2012). The shift has also moved beyond technological applications to learning environments to an understanding that learning must now be recalibrated to thrive in our super digital existence because we perceive learning and life through different lens.
For a long time we have been using ATM cards to deposit and withdraw money. We utilize electronic signatures, chip-pinned credit cards, M-Money and other digital currencies to facilitate our financial transactions. We read our favourite books on kindles. We peruse websites to do our shopping, look for dates, to download music and even to worship. We view the latest Blockbuster hits from the privacy of our homes. We communicate almost exclusively through our social networks like Face Book, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and now TikTok but perhaps in a Janet Jacksonesque way we must still ask “what have we done for or with education lately?” How has our educational system risen to the challenge and reality of a digital existence? Why do we in the Caribbean remain inordinately concerned with the prestige of old school ties and with the seeming frivolous entrapments of the old educational order, when there remains in a digital global space, a world that is so flat, with so much to conquer in terms of learning?
Finding the way for education in a complex digital maze will be no mean feat simply because the digital revolution is multifaceted in its application. Articulating the needs of small island developing states which must compete for scarce resources while remaining competitive in a digital global environment will require a strategic response to digital development at the national level. This response should include:
- The articulation of a cross sectoral national digital development response
- The transfer of an understanding of digital development as simply device focused to people focused, in terms of the development of higher order digital competencies and skills
- The development of digital policies and frameworks which can be applied to educational settings at all levels
- The leveraging of digital literacy development as the “new” 21st Century literacy which is required for survival in digital environments
- The rolling out of targeted digital training for educational leaders and teachers which matches national development goals
- The articulation of digital literacy benchmarks for students at all levels across the educational sector
- The execution, monitoring and evaluation of how training is transferred to actual digital practices in educational institutions across the various formats including traditional face-to-face learning, blended learning and synchronous and asynchronous online learning
Hopefully, seizing the day in this moment of educational vulnerability into which we have been thrust as a consequence of COVID 19, can become the vehicle to empower us to relinquish the old ways and embrace the new.
© Dr. Denise J. Charles (2020)
References
Charles, D. J. (2019): Exploring the digital literacy practices and perspectives of higher education leaders and the implications for digital leadership: A phenomenological study. Doctoral thesis.
Eshet, Y. (2012). Thinking in the digital era: A revised model for digital literacy. Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology. Retrieved from http://iisit.org/Vol9/IISITv9p267-276Eshet021.pdf
JISC, (2015). Digital capabilities. The 6 elements defined. Retrieved from https://digitalcapability.jiscinvolve.org/wp/files/2015/06/1.-Digital- capabilities-6-elements.pdf
Sharpe, R. & Beetham, H. (2010). Understanding students’ uses of technology for learning: Towards creative appropriation. In: Rethinking learning for a digital age: How learners are shaping their own experiences, Routledge. pp. 85-99. Retrieved from: https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/items/4887c90b-adc6-db4f-397f- ea61e53739e0/1/
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