Critical Digital Education for All!
Activating global digital citizenship in Latin America and the Caribbean
Para leer en español, haga clic aquí.
JAAKLAC initiative broadens participation in the governance of the digital ecosystem and promotes Latin American projects in critical digital education. We are guided by human rights and focused on younger generations and generally excluded groups. (JAAKLAC is an acronym composed of words that represent our values in various languages of the Latinx community.)
How do we come to this work?
Global “Divisions of Learning”
The digital ecosystem is deeply entrenched in society, with individuals engaging ever more intensively with a plethora of digital devices and platforms. This phenomenon has been further deepened by the digitization of processes on behalf of public, private, and civil society organizations, pursuing trends of “digital transformation.” As a result, almost every dimension of human life has been increasingly datafied in the name of capturing opportunities from “big data,” “machine learning,” and “artificial intelligence.” Notwithstanding, these opportunities have been increasingly called into question by international organizations pinpointing human rights violations and consistent misuses and abuses of personal information. To mitigate this, the United Nations (UN) has recommended internationally coordinated and comprehensive strategies, including digital literacy and multi-stakeholder governance.
In order to achieve internationally coordinated and democratic digital governance, it is essential to address a deficit in digital education that has prevailed globally for the last two decades. This situation resulted from digital policies facilitating technological deployment that were driven by prophesies that access per se would be enough. However,
this determination to build the digital superhighway to connect regions and open markets was not matched by determination to deliver quality education about what was being built.
As Zuboff has observed, we are now experiencing a “division of learning” that is defining our information society. This gap, she argues, is broadening social inequalities due to machines automating learning processes that privilege financial interests and depend on the narrow perspective of the tech sector. Although this has been problematized since early in the study of the internet, the educational dimension of the “digital divide” has remained mostly overlooked.
The implications of this learning gap are extremely urgent in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Within the current global inequality crisis, LAC has some of the most stark social divisions. These divisions have been magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic, with digital divides illustrating their causes and consequences in the region. Furthermore, LAC has been increasingly experiencing digital human rights violations. These have been perpetrated on behalf of governments, in complicity with telecommunication and big tech companies. Some examples from recent years include internet blackouts, social media content censorship, online surveillance of journalists and activists, explicit and implicit exclusion from digital welfare, and the deployment of massive biometric control systems. Digital education policies are crucial for mitigating the constraints that digital technologies can impose on individual freedoms and for collectively harnessing digital justice.
Children have also been subject to the challenges that digital technologies entail.
Among cases commonly discussed are growing online gender-based violence and datafication practices in the interest of business, welfare policing, educational performance, and parental control. This situation has been questioned by scholars from the field of online children’s rights, especially since evidencing in 2015 that one third of individuals online globally were children. Furthermore, scholars have shed light on how internet governance discussions have consistently disregarded the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and they have further criticized how digital policies have inadequately ensured children’s protection — and completely ignored their participation.
When it comes to LAC, great advances have been made in terms of children’s rights. Nonetheless, a remaining commonality across countries is the disadvantages that affect younger generations most poignantly. According to UNICEF, in 2020, 46% of Latin American children between 0 and 14 years old were living in poverty, which can severely affect their lifelong development. Such neglect is no exception in the digital policy landscape. That same year, reports showed that 42% of Latin Americans below 25 years old did not have access to the internet. When looking at countries with better-off trajectories in children’s digital access, Uruguay often leads in international rankings. However, since 2007, its progressive welfare digital agenda has failed to thoroughly engage with the CRC. This raises pressing questions about the situation in other Latin American countries with adult-centric traditions and greater difficulties supporting children’s welfare.
Critical Digital Education for All!
To fulfill the UN CRC in the digital age, it is critical to address our current shortfall in digital education policies and practices. “Digital education” refers to teaching and learning with and about digital technologies. Taking a critical stance in this field — Critical Digital Education (CDE) — means zooming in on the knowledge, skills, and values to understand digital technologies and to actively engage in its policies and advancements.
Achieving CDE implies a cross-curricular approach to avoid neutral representations of technology common in the STEM disciplines and to better nurture a radical citizenship concerned about the social, economic, and environmental implications of the digital ecosystem. CDE is fundamental for enabling children to actively participate in the creation of the digital roadmaps that affect them.
To promote children’s best interest, it is imperative to implement Critical Digital Education among adults as well, including parents, caregivers, educators, and policymakers.
The effects of overlooking comprehensive digital education has acute consequences within vulnerable parts of society. In the case of children, concerns have been raised about patterns in countries from the so-called “Global South,” the Majority of the World. In these contexts, adults often present lower digital literacy levels which limit their ability to mediate children’s digital risks. Moreover, harms are amplified by weaker welfare and data protection regulations.
Analyzing the case of LAC, although having been accounted as the most “preponderant” region in educational technology programs, programs have faced substantial problems sustaining themselves and mitigating the region’s sharp social and gender inequalities. By 2018 only five LAC countries had implemented digital education frameworks, and these were mainly dedicated to the labor market, ignoring skills for active digital citizenship.
To activate global digital citizenship with Critical Digital Education, and to research and advocate for digital policies to be aligned with human rights, I launched JAAKLAC initiative in 2020.
JAAKLAC’s projects have explored the possibilities of co-creating educational practices and resources, influenced by Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology. This has aimed at knitting together the knowledge and expertise of activists, creatives, governments, educators, and children and youth from LAC. Our region has made critical contributions to PAR, thanks to the influence of Freire and Fals-Borda. Freire brought to the fore an ethical standpoint on education, involving students and educators in a horizontal, equal, respectful, and plural dialogue. Fals-Borda contributed to educational PAR as a means to manifest social and political change, presenting participation as inextricably political by nature.
JAAKLAC’s CDE projects foster and prototype participatory spaces for digital policies. We achieve this through diverse collaborations oriented by a cross-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder approach. To co-design and reflect on the possibilities and limitations of CDE practices, our activities are based on a Freirean “dialogic education.” This is intended to enable peer learning, nurture understanding of divergent perspectives, and encourage individuals to voice their opinions to collectively make sense of reality. The main results are incorporated into the creation of CDE practices and resources that are shared openly online.
Finally, our approaches are entwined with efforts to revamp definitions of global digital citizenship. Big tech monopolies privilege an elite from the United States. European legislation on data governance increasingly influences “third” regions. Our devices impact the environment and civil rights in Africa and Asia. We must develop competencies for our communities to become agents of change and achieve the local and international digital welfare that we want.
Soledad Magnone (she/her) is a sociologist specializing in the intersections between digital technologies, education and human rights, with a special focus on children, youth and minority groups in Latin America and the Caribbean. PhD student at Tampere University researching the possibilities of Critical Digital Education practices for teacher and student’s participation in the data policy governance based on Participatory Action Research. Professor at FLACSO, researcher at Plan Ceibal, European Schoolnet and Global Kids Online. MozFest Wrangler and Mozilla Creative Media Awardee. Founder of the JAAKLAC initiative, supported by the Red Con Causa, LACNIC’s Leaders 2.0 programme, Tactical Tech, Derechos Digitales and Mozilla Foundation.
Critical Digital Education for All! is the third post in Towards a Mindful Digital Welfare State, a series investigating data-driven state services, commissioned by Researcher Ranjit Singh and Research Analyst Emnet Tafesse at the AI on the Ground Initiative at Data & Society, with editorial support from Seth Young.
To date, the series also includes:
- Towards a Mindful Digital Welfare State by Ranjit Singh
- Between Belonging and Individuating: Data, Identification, Diaspora by Emnet Tafesse
- Good Welfare, Bad Platforms? by Silvia Masiero
- Code as Policy by Rajesh Veeraraghavan
- Identifying Beneficiaries in Ghana’s Donor-Oriented Welfare State by Alena Thiel
- Datafying Children by Grace Mutung’u
