Student Teachers' Perceptions of the Connection between Literacy, Equality and Digitalization

Abstract

Digitalization has many implications for the development of equality in societies and is also reflected in education. In a digitalized world, literacy is an essential skill for both individual and societal development. This study explores Finnish student teachers' perceptions of the connection between literacy, equality, and digitalization. The research material consists of professional opinion pieces written by student teachers (N=37). The qualitative study examined student teachers' perceptions of literacy, equality, and digitalization. Student teachers' perceptions concerned pupils' polarizing backgrounds for learning, literacy instruction and the challenge of differentiating classes, deterioration of literacy and other learning, and positive aspects of literacy learning. The results show that student teachers recognize the connection between literacy and digitalization and their broad impact on societal development and equity. As future teachers, they perceived the impact of the development of inequalities on everyday school life and on opportunities to learn key skills as a challenge. The results show that the polarizing starting points for pupils is a worrying trend and challenges the future teacher in a digitalizing world. The results of the study underline that teacher training and teachers are important societal actors and reformers.

How Does the Program Organisasi Penggerak (POP) Improve the Quality of Literacy Learning? An Evaluation Based on A Goal-Oriented Model

“…The development of technology is so fast, causing information to spread quickly until there is a tsunami of information. This encourages the need to strengthen literacy and numeracy as a provision for students in sorting and managing the information they get [17]. However, in the results of the evaluation of the first objective, the teacher's understanding of the relationship between current learning conditions and the urgency of literacy/numeracy, is not fully understood.…”