Digital divide, critical‐, and crisis‐informatics perspectives on K‐12 emergency remote teaching during the pandemic

Abstract

The rapid deployment of emergency remote teaching in the pandemic presents sweeping societal‐level information systems phenomena worthy of scholarly inquiry. This paper reports findings from teacher interviews conducted with K‐12 public school teachers, exploring how digital access and use gaps in communities reflect wider digital and social inequalities as schools fulfilled emergency remote teaching mandates, becoming swept up into e‐learning technology expansion trends propelled by mandates, and unfettered corporate edtech. Results show persistence of home and school level digital affordance gaps as hindrances to pandemic pedagogy. We build upon theory of the digital divide, and crisis and critical informatics literature considering how critical approaches to the study of socio‐technical systems research can inform these understandings, providing insights into how localized digital inequities contribute to broader digital inequality and social inequality, in the educative processes expected of public education in democratic societies. Our work gives voice to one highly pressured and conflicted stakeholder in these dynamics—K‐12 public school teachers—and demonstrates some of the ways in which digital inequity gaps may play a further magnifying role of societal division through expanding edtech deployment in K‐12 grades, if current edtech trends hold.

Communicating shared situational awareness in times of chaos: Social media and theCOVID‐19 pandemic

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“…The pandemic also highlighted the inequities in the US education system, which give rise to an unequal distribution of technology-supported learning experiences (Aguilar, 2020; Aguiliera and Nightengale-Lee, 2020; Reynolds and Chu, 2020; Reynolds et al , 2022). Compared to children living in higher-income households, children living in low-income households faced disproportionately greater challenges when schools closed down and teaching moved online (Goldhaber et al , 2022).…”

Platforms, perceptions, and privacy: ethical implications of student conflation of educational technologies

“…While educational platforms were already established in US educational contexts by the end of the 2010s, the COVID-19 pandemic led to further adoption of – and concern about – these platforms. The pandemic shift to emergency remote teaching (Hodges et al , 2020) across educational institutions required the adoption of new platforms (Greenhow et al , 2021; Pokhrel and Chhetri, 2021), and the urgent nature of the shift likely dissuaded holistic evaluation of these platforms, instead further entrenching utilitarian perspectives of educational technology (see, for example, Reynolds et al , 2022). While long-term educational impacts are yet to be documented, several studies have shown a range of immediate and short-term impacts resulting from the shift from in-person to wholly online education.…”

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