Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

You’re committed to equity and inclusion. You’ve been educating yourself about how higher ed systemically and systematically privileges some and disadvantages others, while working to create a just and equitable experience for minoritized students. Active learning pedagogies are already part of your toolbox, and you support your department’s ideas on curricular change. Still, you aren’t quite sure how to translate your commitment into further action. What’s next?

The following article identifies four pedagogical strategies for creating and delivering the equity-minded course you’re seeking. I suspect at least several of these are already familiar to you, so I’ve also included suggestions for how to extend and deepen your use of them. They are presented in no particular order; start with which ever one makes sense for you, your students, and the content you teach.

CHICAGO — Colleges are increasingly using Big Data to monitor students, control their access to information and set them on learning paths they may not have chosen, argues Chris Gilliard, a professor at Macomb Community College, who says the practices add up to “digital redlining.”

“I don’t think education is a predictive task,” said Gilliard, criticizing the use of data systems that allegedly forecast student success or failure. “I’m seeing a whole lot of wreckage in the process that people aren’t considering.”

By now the coronavirus, and the resulting fallout, has impacted just about every family in one way or another. Students are out of school, unemployment is rising and social distancing could take a psychological toll. But not everyone is equally affected.

Nearly 30 million low-income students rely on schools for breakfast or lunch, leaving schools scrambling to make new plans. Fourteen percent of households with school-age children do not have internet access, most of which earn less than $50,000 a year. And research indicates that students from low-income backgrounds could fall further behind their peers if learning stops too long and the country sinks into recession.

This vignette cuts to the heart of equality vs. equity in the classroom. If equality means giving everyone the same resources, equity means giving each student access to the resources they need to learn and thrive. As those of us who are parents know, each child is different. It can be tough to meet their competing needs, but this is pretty much the job description for parenting and, I would argue, for teaching. Jane could have modeled paragraph revision until she was blue in the face, but Veronica lacked the building blocks of a sentence. Instead, Jane provided this learner with a critical resource: the attention of her skillful teacher.