The role of teachers in a sustainable university: from digital competencies to postdigital capabilities

Abstract

An increase in online and hybrid education during and after the Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the infiltration of digital media into mainstream university teaching. Global challenges, such as ecological crises, call for further radical changes in university teaching, requiring an even richer convergence of ‘natural,’ ‘human’ and ‘digital’. In this paper, we argue that this convergence demands us to go beyond ‘the great online transition’ and reframe how we think about university, teachers’ roles and their competencies to use digital technologies. We focus on what it takes to be a teacher in a sustainable university and consider emerging trends at three levels of the educational ecosystem—global developments (macro), teachers’ local practices (meso), and daily activities (micro). Through discussion of examples of ecopedagogies and pedagogies of care and self-care, we argue that teaching requires a fluency to embrace different ways of knowing and collective awareness of how the digital is entwined with human practices within and across different levels of the educational ecosystem. For this, there is a need to move beyond person-centric theorisations of teacher digital competencies towards more holistic, ecological conceptualisations. It also requires going beyond functionalist views of teachers’ roles towards enabling their agentive engagement with a future-oriented, sustainable university mission.

Analysis of Digital Teacher Education: Key Aspects for Bridging the Digital Divide and Improving the Teaching–Learning Process

“…In the context of rapid evolution towards an increasingly digitized society, the significance of digital competencies for teachers is magnified in terms of future readiness [41]. The insightful data obtained in research on the digital competence of in-service teachers not only reflects the current situation but also underscores the urgent need to cultivate robust digital competencies to address the challenges of tomorrow [42].…”

Comparing University Students’ Performance in the Statistical Processing and Visualization of Laboratory Data before, during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Due to the sudden transition to remote education in early 2020, many students and teachers initially declared a preference for face-to-face teaching [46,47]. A dialogue, teacher initiative and efficient course design were the key factors in the success of online courses during the pandemic [42,48,49]. It is obvious that face-to-face education cannot be fully replaced by online learning in medical, technical and natural science disciplines [50,51].…”

Sustainability in the Modernization of Higher Education: Curricular Transformation and Sustainable Campus—A Literature Review

“…In more recent works, Markauskaite, Carvalho, and Fawns [77] seek to relate the growing challenges that are being felt with the demands that are being placed in order to reach a more sustainable university. Looking, on the one hand, at the growing digitization that is felt in regular university education (largely a result of the pandemic period we have just experienced) and, conversely, at a broad set of global challenges, as is the case of ecological crises, which require sweeping changes in university teaching, with a more effective interaction between the natural, human, and digital, the authors emphasize that this interaction requires an action that goes beyond the digital transition.…”