Teachers’ digital competence for global teacher education

Empowering people to use knowledge

The content of this special issue contributes to constructing a new profile of a global teacher from an international perspective by defining competences that 21st-century educators must have in a society that is global and digital at the same time.

The goals defined in the 2030 agenda of international organisations, especially UNESCO and European Commission, require education to empower people to use knowledge, competences and values so that they can live in dignity, organise their lives and help improve their societies.

If we are to apply the framework of competences for democratic culture (Council of Europe 2018) to transform lives through education, to recognise the important role of education as a major driver of development and to achieve the other proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) (Incheon Declaration and SDG4 – Ensure quality education for all) (UNESCO 2016), we need to educate citizens in other competences and provide a new vision of the teacher education curriculum oriented towards inclusion, equity and quality.

‘Twenty-first century skills’ (Ananiadou and Claro 2009) seem to have emerged as the consensus term used by researchers and practitioners in the field of education. These skills give teachers the ability to respond to students’ needs (European Commission 2013; Caena 2014). The UNESCO eAtlas of Teachers and TALIS, OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey, provide information from various countries about the main requirements of education, but they do not always lead to innovation and improvement in teacher education programmes. Likewise, Teachers for Education 2030 (UNESCO 2020) is a forum for policymakers, researchers and academics who take part in defining a global education agenda. Its objective is to give teacher education an international perspective and foster continuing professional development, with motivation as its main axis (especially from the perspective of citizenship). If we bear in mind the ever-changing digital context, we need to redefine teacher education and decide what competences we should include in curricula to ensure that teachers are prepared for present and future challenges.

Education in a global, changing digital context

Over the last two decades we have associated educational, social and economic change with the digital society and technological development with digitalisation. However, it is not only digitalisation that affects or contributes to reducing the impact of the various crises such as demographic decline, the climate crisis or voluntary or forced migrations. All these changes require the educational process to develop from a mono cultural perspective to an inter-, multi- and transcultural perspective. In such a complex social and educational context, we should not forget that teachers at all levels of education are responsible for understanding education from this polyhedral and global perspective, with all that this entails in terms of their initial and lifelong teacher education, and their professional development.

The crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the power of technology in designing new learning environments where the educational process can meet most of the needs of teachers with the use of online tools. Teaching is no longer confined to physical space. In short, it must be defined by the needs of the students and must not be marked only by the contents, needs and perspective of the teacher. At the same time, studies of the use of digital resources show that the digital competence of educators is low. In general, our educators are technologically literate, but not competent (Gisbert 2022).

From a global educational perspective, another aspect needs to be taken into account: the chances the general public have of accessing technology and making good use of it for active citizenship in their daily lives. For two decades now public policies and international organisations have been focusing on the importance of equality, cohesion and equity and the need to take measures to prevent the effects of the digital divide (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2001). In the early 2000s, a step towards social inclusion in a technological world was defined as an essential strategy to prevent the digital divide. In 2021 the European Commission presented an overview of digital goals for the Europe of 2030 and this year, 2022, it issued the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles. This declaration focused on ensuring people’s freedom of choice, safety and security, solidarity and inclusion, participation and sustainability (European Commission 2022). Overseas, countries such as Uruguay have endeavoured to implement a digitalisation plan for the general public. The Ceibal Plan has provided the whole population with devices and training, and set up observatories to monitor and collect evidence that has been useful for defining teacher education as based on continuous research process tied to digital technology (Ferrando et al. 2011).

The International Commission on the Future of Education created by UNESCO in 2019 on the basis of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, includes nine basic ideas for the future of education as the fundamental basis of society. The aim is not only to guarantee access to quality education for all people at all levels, but also to ensure that people are educated on equal terms and from an equitable and inclusive perspective. These new principles range from ensuring that education is a common good with equal opportunities to allocating sufficient budgets to make this possible without forgetting to highlight the importance of competent educators by ensuring optimal conditions for their professional development. Considering the characteristics of the digital society in terms of inclusion and exclusion, however, this is not enough to ensure educational equity. One of the latest documents published in Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC 2021) relies on evidence collected after the first waves of COVID-19, focusing on the emerging divides in the population as a result of increasing poverty in rural areas (among children and adolescents), in indigenous communities, in communities of African descent, and in those sectors of the population with economic problems and little education.

From the perspective of equity, digital inclusion has increasingly less to do with access to technology and more to do with creating knowledge, attitudes and skills to manage technology. In this regard, the needs of people are increasingly in the areas of infrastructures (power supply, device updating, connectivity, etc.) and the basic training required to make good use of it, such as digital literacy, specific skills and digital competencies (Gisbert and Lázaro 2020).

An increasingly digital society must educate the general public to become technologically competent. That is, people must be enabled to develop their digital competences. Digital citizens are often educated in informal ways (and they will use everything that will help them to develop as digital users). Of all the different contexts, formal, non-formal and informal (from those most related to education in structured contexts and supervised by public policies to informal learning processes managed by individuals themselves), only the first can be controlled by a teacher and can ensure that future citizens are given the appropriate training for the needs of today’s digital society. For this reason, formal education must also take responsibility for the development of digital citizens.

Failure to dedicate the necessary resources to developing competence domains (Being Online, Well-being Online and Rights Online) leads to an increase in digital exclusion in proportion to the speed of technological advances. This can only be reversed if we are able to generate true technological ecosystems for learning designed to develop the competences of digital citizenship for everyone (Gisbert and Lázaro 2020). For this to be possible, we must also ensure optimal professional development of the digital competence of our teachers.

In this ecosystem, educational organisations must play a major role in providing society with all the necessary technological resources and infrastructures (libraries, resource centres, laboratories, digitalised rooms for teaching, etc.). Students need to be provided with the technological means to make up for the shortcomings of their personal environment and thus ensure that they are educated in such a way that they can cope with the challenges of society and the professional world. Open Labs designed from a social perspective and with open access can constitute places and strategies for social innovation and creation using both analogical and digital collaborative processes.

We must educate teachers to be able to rise to these challenges by using formal education in conjunction with non-formal and informal approaches as part of the same educational strategies. The education of future teachers must provide them with an overall understanding that makes them aware, from the very beginning of their education, of the importance of socio-economic variables for social and educational balance.

The contents of this special issue

The papers that make up this volume provide a global perspective of the competences teachers need for their professional development. They take into account geographical context and also theoretical and research approaches.

The first paper ‘Teacher learning and innovative professional development through the lens of the Personal, Social and Learning to Learn European key competence’, by Caena and Vuorikari, concludes that adaptive, socio-emotional and metacognitive competences are essential in teacher education because they are needed to educate people so that they can face the demands of an increasingly unpredictable world (as argued in the LifeComp European framework).

The second paper, ‘ Do digital competence frameworks align with preparing beginning teachers for digitally infused contexts? An evaluation from a New Zealand perspective’, by Starkey and Yates, evaluates three frameworks (DigCompEdu; ISTE standards; and the Norwegian professional digital competence framework for teachers) and concludes that the most holistic option is to use all three frameworks and adapt them to create an approach specific to the educational context in New Zealand.

The third paper, ‘International insights about a holistic model of teaching competence for a digital era: the digital teacher framework reviewed’, by Castañeda, Esteve-Mon, Adell and Prestridge, examines a holistic framework for teaching in the digital era in terms of teachers’ career perspectives. The authors used semi-structured interviews with expert teachers (from Australia, Europe and the Latin-America) to define a holistic framework for teaching digital competence.

In the fourth paper, ‘Digital competences for teacher professional development. Systematic review’, Fernández-Batanero, Montenegro-Rueda, Fernández-Cerero and García-Martínez make a systematic review and a meta-analysis of 21 studies in the databases Scopus and WoS (from 2008 to 2018). Their aim is to identify research trends and the potential direction of future research on digital teaching competence. The method followed is that described in the PRISMA Statement Guidelines for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis.

The fifth paper, ‘Training pre-service teachers to enhanced digital education’ by Gisbert-Cervera, Usart and Lázaro-Cantabrana, examines whether there is a need for a specific pre-service programme so that teachers can begin their professional careers with the right level of teacher digital competence (TDC). The paper discusses three case studies that measure the TDC of pre-service teachers in pre-school and primary education.

Finally, the sixth paper, ‘Adopting technology in schools: modelling, measuring and supporting knowledge appropriation’ Ley, Tammets, Sarmiento-Márquez, Leoste, Hallik and Poom-Valickisa, presents a study of a teacher professional development programme in the iTeacher Innovation Laboratory (based on school−university co-creation partnerships) that creates an instrument to predict the impact of social practices on the adoption of technology in the classroom.