The presentation will examine the potential of digital technologies to close the pedagogical divide that frequently consigns socially disadvantaged and minoritized multilingual students to less intellectually challenging instructional experiences than their more advantaged peers. Examples will be presented in the context of transmission, social constructivist, and transformative pedagogical orientations.
The phenomenon of a pedagogical divide refers to the fact that students from socially disadvantaged, minoritized, and migrant communities often experience instruction that is less cognitively and imaginatively challenging than that experienced by their more socially advantaged peers. In school systems that separate students into vocational and ‘academic’ streams at an early age, the pedagogical divide is reflected in the overrepresentation of socially disadvantaged and migrant-background students in vocational programs. The presentation will examine ways in which schools have successfully challenged the pedagogical divide in the context of a pedagogical framework that distinguishes between transmission, social constructivist, and transformative orientations. These three pedagogical orientations are seen as nested within each other rather than as distinct, isolated, or opposed to each other. In the context of more equitable transmission of curriculum content to multilingual students who are in the process of learning the language of instruction, challenges to the pedagogical divide will be illustrated by an online system entitled Binogi (called Studi in Sweden and Finland) developed in Sweden designed to support students in gaining access to and learning curriculum content. Curriculum content is presented through 5/6-minute animated modules that are narrated both orally and in written form (subtitles) in multiple languages (see binogi.com). Students (or teachers) can choose the language in which they want to listen to the content, and they can also choose the language of the written subtitles. Within social constructivist approaches to pedagogy, the pedagogical divide has been challenged by means of collaborative projects involving Internet-linked partner classes in different linguistic and cultural contexts that are focused on co-construction of knowledge. A transformative approach builds on and expands transmission and social constructivist approaches by using the affordances of digital technologies to pursue critical inquiry into issues of social and global relevance (e.g., racism, climate destruction, etc.).
