Food for thought: an analogy for digital sovereignty in education

Abstract

Digital sovereignty in education can be described as the ability of the educational community to exercise their agency and self-governance to guarantee that the use of technology is aligned with the purpose of education. The lack of familiarity of educators with critical digital literacy studies often hinders productivity on the debate and practice of its principles, such as ethics, environmental impact, or digital agency. Novice learners, as are often average educators with respect to technology, often fail to represent the problems using domain principles, as experts do. Besides, self-efficacy is known to influence student learning, enabling the transition from motivation to action when positive. Previous studies suggest that in-service teachers commonly lack confidence with respect to their digital competence. Effective analogies can assist educators in critically interpreting technological innovations by activating relevant prior knowledge from their contexts, which facilitates the representational change toward more abstract understandings of technological impact. This paper proposes the analogy with the food sovereignty principles, broadly accepted within educators, and presents an initial qualitative evaluation. The results suggest its potential to address the barriers of misrepresentation and lack of confidence. On the one hand, the analogy is easily understood and allows teachers to identify structural similarities at the level of their educational values, facilitating more abstract representations than their initial encoding. In addition, it is anticipated that, by situating the discussion within domains where teachers feel more confident than in technical topics, they seem more confident to generate new knowledge that facilitates this learning.