The poor digital skills of Italians can be traced back to defensive teaching

(by Fulvio Oscar Benussi AIDR member) Defensive teaching "can be attributed a part of responsibility for the scarce diffusion of digital skills: the results of international comparisons show that the backwardness in the diffusion of digital skills among the population has basically remained stationary since 2015. National research indicates that some cultural hostility to the use of digital technologies in teaching is widespread among teachers.

Italy is down this year by two positions in the ranking of the DESI index relating to the digitization of the economy and society. The overall DESI index, updated annually by the European Commission, is calculated as a weighted average of the five main DESI dimensions: connectivity, human capital, use of the Internet, integration of digital technology and digital public services.

In this article we will focus in particular on the human capital dimension.

The dimension of DESI human capital relating to digital skills, shown in figure 1, is calculated as the weighted average of the two sub-dimensions:

  • 2nd Internet User Skills
  • 2b Advanced skills and development.

The substantial stationarity since 2015 of the digital skills of human capital, we believe can reasonably be attributed in part to deficiencies, in this sense, of school education.

From the document "Result from TALIS 2018"

From the document, pre covid, "Result from TALIS 2018" it emerges that: throughout the OECD, the development of competences in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (hereinafter ICT) is an area in which teachers claim to have need for more training, together with teaching in multicultural / multilingual contexts and teaching students with special needs. Among these three areas, teachers in Italy expressed a greater need for ICT training for teaching.

On average in Italy, 31% of school leaders report that the delivery of quality education in their school is hampered by a lack or inadequacy of digital technology for education (compared to 25% of the OECD average). These findings were confirmed in the covid era.

Digital skills are not improvised. Only the teachers who already owned them were able to carry out their activities remotely with objectives, methodologies and didactic proposals capable of enhancing the contribution of the digital instrument as facilitator and amplifier of learning related to the taught discipline.

Others had to work hard both in the paths related to their personal online training, and in the subsequent preparation and delivery of their teaching which often took place proposing the traditional school model: teacher's explanations, tasks to be carried out independently by the students and subsequent verification. Finally, other teachers, fortunately few, have renounced to carry out any form of distance learning, effectively stopping their activity from the start of the lockdown.

The PNSD and CENSIS research

The DESI results seem to indicate that even the National Digital School Plan (hereinafter PNSD) does not seem to have been able to affect curricular teaching in order to allow our country to recover the detachment from other European countries.

Censis has recently published a research conducted in collaboration with AGI Agenzia Italia from which the table shown in figure 2 was taken

As can be seen from the table, the school managers complained in the courses proposed in the context of the PNSD of the "Lack of an underlying pedagogical model (with the risk that technologies are used with a traditional approach)".

Surely the "sense" of a digital teaching cannot be that of learning and then teaching in addition to the discipline of which you also own software. Instead, it is necessary that the teachers, in the training courses dedicated to them, are illustrated, and if possible made to prove, the potential of the proposed software not as stand-alone objects, but as tools to support disciplinary teaching.

Another element that emerged from Censis research and indicated in the table in figure 2 concerns the "cultural hostilities" that teachers have towards digital.

We think that these "cultural hostilities" are linked to an approach to teaching that we will call "defensive".

In Figure 3 we have outlined the motivations and approaches of defensive teaching, a term borrowed from "defensive bureaucracy" proposed in March 2016 by Carlo Mochi Sismondi President of FPA srl which had, in turn, taken it up from the term "defensive medicine" proposed by Federico Gelli .

We can consider "defensive teaching" the practice of carrying out the lessons in frontal mode by proposing only contents taken from the textbook. This practice is so consolidated that it was also repeated by most teachers in distance learning during the lockdown.

The perpetuation of this teaching practice over time allows teachers to avoid carrying out a digital teaching that would involve the transfer with the class from the classroom to the laboratory, or a remote management of the exercises.

Instead, in order to avoid the risk of a delegitimization of their leadership due to possible defiance in the conduct of the exercise due to insufficient technical skills, the children renounce to propose a disciplinary teaching synergistically connected to digital.

Defensive teaching

With regard to the item "Frequent requests by the legislator to deal with new education with new, too many educational objectives", it has had a recent confirmation with the introduction of the teaching of civic education at school. In fact, the standard provides for a very vast set of contents to be proposed at school while hoping that students can become responsible and active citizens. But becoming responsible and active citizens is possible if you acquire skills consistent with this goal and not if you study more content ...

Another element that characterizes defensive teaching is regret for the ministerial program which was indicated as a peremptory set of content to be treated in the classroom. The ministerial program, now conceptually superseded by national guidelines, is still cited today by teachers to stem any request for modification or integration of their way of operating.

The term defensive teaching well highlights the risk that the Italian school will succumb to the temptation of not wanting to pass the paper as the only training vehicle.

Why did we propose the term "defensive teaching"?

The need not to interrupt school service due to the pandemic pushed the majority of Italian teachers to deal with ICT technologies and this experience could favor the diffusion of a more digital teaching in Italian schools.

This outcome is not obvious, however, the "return to the past" remains a possible option.

In this case, defensive teaching would regain credit and the history of the country's backwardness and resistance to change could also confirm the worrying data that emerged today in new DESI assessments: "[...] 58% of Italians (population between 16 and 74 years) does not have at least a basic level of digital skills. So to speak, that allows you to exercise citizenship rights in full in the times of the Internet. "

A tool for self-evaluation of schools

We report in conclusion of the article a useful tool for those schools interested in developing their digital potential.

This tool helps answer the question: Is the school making the best use of digital technologies for teaching and learning?

See: https://ec.europa.eu/education/schools-go-digital_it

 

The poor digital skills of Italians can be traced back to defensive teaching