The digital equity hallucination
Digital devices ≠ equity
Like many educators in North America, I have been thinking a lot about equity in schools. And as a digital educator and administrator, the challenge of digital equity has been my job for the last 27 years. In 2019, I was part of a team that was recognized by CoSN with a Community Leadership Award for Digital Equity. Representing a diverse team of educators, I joined colleagues Zach Desjarlais and Steve Bratt to receive the award. And as we stood on stage, each of us knew that we had so much more work to do to ensure digital equity for our students. Despite our progress, it is not enough to simply provide access. I’ve come to believe that digital equity includes not one, but four key components.
Access
Equity of digital access is about hardware, software, and services, ensuring the traditional notion of the digital divide is recognized and addressed. Billions of dollars are spent on digital tools and services in the United States, often focused on providing 1:1 devices for all or most students. From my experience, this is the first and most basic level of digital equity, requiring significant investments, training, support, and plans for sustaining these investments over time. Equity of access also must address how to provide robust wireless broadband access outside of the school. School leaders who simply pass out Chromebooks believing that they’re being digitally equitable are mistaken. Poverty, homelessness, cultural fear, and rural geography are significant barriers to ensuring all really means all when it comes to digital access.
Opportunity
In recent years, the idea of digital equity has been expanded to include opportunity. In other words, do all students have equitable opportunities to learn using the digital tools that are being provided to them? From my perspective as a digital educator and leader, equity of opportunity speaks to systemic programs and pathways that are made available to learners. And opportunity is often viewed as providing programs of choice.
Is there equity of opportunity when one teacher is utilizing augmented reality to do an innovative collaborative partnership with a local museum and the teacher next door is lecturing and working from a 20-year-old textbook?
A simple example is STEAM. While maker spaces and coding programs have become all the rage, these specialized offerings promoting science, math, and technology have historically attracted and featured disproportionate numbers of boys vs. girls and often have limited participation by non-white students. Coding and programming courses are another area where gender and racial imbalances occur. While magnet programs or schools may offer pathways for students to learn in different ways, equity of opportunity may be an illusion. If students have not had previous opportunities to experience and learn prerequisite skills and habits, then they may not have the interest or aptitude to take advantage of specialized offerings. And if students do have interest, implicit barriers can exist in the form of entrance assessments, prerequisites, language or cultural bias, and even something as mundane as transportation.
Equity of opportunity also applies in the regular classroom. In more traditional content areas and programs, there can be a wide range of teacher skills and utilization of effective learning strategies. Speaking from experience, teaching practices do not necessarily change when teachers get an iPad and dozens of hours of high quality professional development. And from a student’s perspective, is there equity of opportunity when one teacher is utilizing augmented reality to do an innovative collaborative partnership with a local museum and the teacher next door is lecturing and working from a 20-year-old textbook?
Choice
Equity of choice in digital learning is simple — do students have authentic choice in what, when, how, and with whom they learn? The promise of digital learning is a liberation from the tyranny of the textbook, the lecture, and teachers solely defining the path, pace, place, and products of learning. Despite the promise of digital learning and the investment in technology, schools continue to operate as they have for decades. While digital learning tools may enable students to remotely take online Mandarin courses, create innovative multimedia, or collaborate with classmates, students face significant barriers to choice in their learning. Equity of choice is an issue with both access and opportunity.
As an example, some schools and systems have chosen to increase digital access through BYOD or Bring Your Own Device rather than providing a standardized school-issued tool. While this might be viewed as supporting choice, it is implicitly inequitable. First, students need more than a smartphone and a wireless plan to be effective digital learners. Next, students living in affluence and/or stable and supportive families are far more likely to be able to have access to a current and appropriate device (or devices) than children living in poverty, transiency, or with families with cultures with different views about technology and schools. And the illusion of equity within affluent school populations is commonplace. Students and families in crisis exist in every school, not just the ones in the poorer neighborhoods. Aside from BYOD, even those school systems which have adopted 1:1 devices may also effectively limit choice when they only offer a specific platform or form factor. While standardization simplifies implementation, it may not effectively allow learners to use what they need to learn.
Inequity of choice also applies to opportunities for learning. As an example, students in special education or intervention programs are often assigned additional content, services, or classes to remediate their assessment deficits. In doing so, they may be unable to participate in enrichment electives, projects, or programs offered to students who are at or above benchmark achievement levels. As such, they lack the choice to participate, even if they have interest and the opportunities exist.
Is there equity of choice when some students are using their devices for drill and kill remediation while others use them to program robots?
Pedagogy
Equity of pedagogy is perhaps the biggest challenge of all — do teachers create learning opportunities and environments that allow all students to find meaning, relevance, and rigor because of, not despite, their diversity? Thanks to work that Dr. Yemi Stembridge has done with my recent district, I have come to frame equity as a fundamentally pedagogical question. Stembridge makes a simple argument. If you rethink and remake instruction in specific ways, all students will have better learning outcomes, regardless of their ethnicity, skills, backgrounds, and interests. While he is not focused on digital learning, his approach to rethinking pedagogy can both leverage and be enabled by technology. In the same way that Ruben Puentedura’s SAMR Model promotes the redefinition of tasks, an equity-informed pedagogy necessitates changes in educator practice and instructional design. While an equity-informed pedagogy doesn’t require technology, it can benefit from digital tools and services used in innovative ways.
Digital equity requires more than technical solutions .It requires educators to examine their beliefs and behaviors in order to change the culture of learning in schools. Digital equity begins with systemic solutions as foundational enabling conditions.
Equity of access is step one — do students have the tools, services, and resources to learn in more powerful ways?
Equity of opportunity is step two — do schools and systems provide programs and pathways that are responsive to and available to diverse learners and interests? Once the enabling conditions are in place, it is then necessary to re-examine and transform the roles of both learners and educators.
Equity of choice is owned by learners. Do students have authentic agency in how, when, where, and with whom learning occurs? In what ways are students enabled, empowered, and permitted to define their own paths, pace, and conditions of learning?
Equity of pedagogy is about teachers, their practice, and their philosophy — do lessons and the learning environment truly promote and enable personalized learning success for all learners? Are students given the means and opportunity to exercise their choices as learners? And are learning experiences designed with diverse skills, assets, and interests in mind?
For many years as a teacher librarian, I checked out textbooks at the beginning of the school year and collected them back in June. Over the course of the year, some students got A’s. Some students dropped out. In recent years, my colleagues now check out iPads and more recently, Chromebooks. Some students will get A’s. Some students will drop out.
Providing digital devices to students does not change the equity equation in schools.
The promise of digital learning is unique. Digital learning creates an opportunity for learners to be empowered, to use the language of one of the ISTE student standards. Speaking from experience, the challenge of digital equity is not about a device or service, but about empowerment of the learner. Do your learners have authentic choice? Do their teachers create fair, rigorous, and engaging opportunities to exercise that choice? If the answers are no, then you’ve got more work to do, regardless of what device students have in their hands.
