The shifting educational landscape has been catalysed in no small part by considerable advances in digital technologies and their growing significance across everyday and specialised settings. Research points to the impact of these shifts and how they have changed, the ways we access, process, share, and acquire knowledge; and how we communicate, build relationships, and engage in social activities (Domingue, 2016). HEIs and educators have contributed to the expansion and intensification of these trends by engaging students in practical and intellectual work in digitally enhanced settings. With that said, it is not surprising that the remnants of the rapidly changing teaching and learning environment has led to increased expectations on educators to be digitally competent.
Responding to these developments, this paper introduces some preliminary findings from an ongoing project relating to digital enhancement in social policy education in Ireland. Social Policy Educators: Enhancing Digital Skills is a project funded by the National Forum for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, which aims to cultivate a teaching and learning culture that is attentive to digital skills and literacies in the discipline of social policy. The project strives to account for and respond to social policy educators’ digital literacy training needs in a variety of ways including, a) the development of a comprehensive self-assessment and attitudinal survey for social policy educators that builds upon on existing digital literacy frameworks (All Aboard; DigiCompEdu), b) an assessment of student perceptions of the ‘ideal’ digital skills required by social policy educators, and c) by fostering collaborative relationships between social policy educators, instructional designers, and educational technologists in training and development initiatives.
Drawing on the concept of educator-as-learner, this paper identifies some of the opportunities and challenges involved in fostering digital enhancement in social policy education in Ireland. Embedding digital skills in the discipline of social policy requires a strategic and comprehensive effort across institutions, academic units, and programmes. Preliminary findings suggest that cultivating relationships provides an important consideration in fostering change. This paper explores the challenges facing social policy educators seeking to enhance the digital capacity of their discipline. Issues such as time and resources; learner and workload anxiety (Psiropoulos, 2016); resistance and barriers to change (Brownell and Tanner, 2012) are considered. In response to these challenges, the paper then examines the role of digital enthusiasts and early adopters as change agents (McKinney, 2012) and informal educators in the discipline; often acting as critical nodes by providing creative and practical leadership through their own learning.
Citations
Brownell, S. E., and Tanner, K. D. (2012) “Barriers to faculty pedagogical change: lack of training, time, incentives, and... tensions with professional identity?” CBE-Life Sciences Education, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 339-346.
Domingue, A. (2016) “Online and Blended Pedagogy in Social Justice Education”, in Adams, M., Bell, L., Goodman, D., and Joshi, K. (eds.) Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, in New York: Routledge, pp. 369 – 396.
McKinney, K. (2012) “Making a difference: Application of SoTL to enhance learning” Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Vol.12, No.1, pp. 1 – 7
Psiropoulos, D., Barr, S., Eriksson, C., Fletcher, S., Hargis, J., and Cavanaugh, C. (2016) “Professional development for iPad integration in general education: Staying ahead of the curve”, Education and Information Technologies, Vol.21, No.1, pp. 209–228
Topics: Continuing Professional Development , Topics: Digital Technologies in Disciplinary Contexts
