More than just a little red dot or a fine country, Singapore is also internationally recognized for its high quality education system. As COVID-19 continues to live among us despite medical breakthroughs in terms of providing people with vaccination against the virus, it becomes pertinent more than ever now that we nurture our youths to be creative and critical thinkers in order to thrive in an endemic world. In her keynote address at the recent Teachers’ Conference and Excel Fest 2021, British education consultant, writer and researcher Dr Helen Beetham shares with teacher-participants the importance of adopting new ways of thinking in a rapidly changing world as we educate our youths for uncertain futures. Below is an edited transcript of Dr Beetham’s keynote address.

Teaching in Times of a Pandemic

In these really difficult times we are going through, it is our teachers that have been in the frontline; second, perhaps, only to our healthcare colleagues. We have been helping children to continue with their learning during the challenges of the pandemic, and in the UK, we like to say that nobody is safe until everybody is safe.

This also rings true with learning – we can’t really learn how to respond well to the crisis until we are all responding together. And it’s in this spirit that I hope we can share some of the lessons that we have learned about digital learning and about digital literacy over the very difficult times we’ve been through.

So now, I would like to speak a little today about digital literacies; why I think they matter, and tell you a story of how they had become mainstream and where I think they might be going next. I’ll talk a little bit about new kinds of thinking and how we can support our young people with those new kinds of thinking, and how they can also teach us to think in new ways.

Importance of Digital Literacy

Let’s begin by asking what is now quite an old question. It was 15 years ago that I and some colleagues began to wonder: What is this thing called digital literacy? One of the conclusions we came to at the time was that digital literacies, having them or perhaps not having them in such great abundance, would make a huge difference to individuals and to societies; that it would have a lifelong and lifewide impact. And how we define digital literacy is when an individual has the capabilities that allow them to live, learn and work in a digital society.

So we moved on from thinking only about how we teach with technology to thinking more about those technologies and those techniques being in the hands of learners: What does it mean for our teaching when learners have access to this abundance of information and of technical devices? What does it mean when we focus on what they are doing, rather than what we’re doing? We have seen how important it is that everyone has access to digital functional skills but immediately once they have that access, students also need to know what to do with it.

And because we are educators, we want to know what our students are doing with knowledge in particular. How are they engaging in new knowledge practices because they have access to these new platforms and media? Now, there is another important aspect of digital literacy: if we were to thrive in a digital society, we know that societies are all not the same, even within one’s culture. Bringing that back to education, subject disciplines are not the same. There isn’t one form of digital literacy but many different methods, concepts, tools and media. Everyone will have their own style of digital participation and their own disciplinary perspective on knowledge practice.

So teachers have a special role and responsibility in guiding the next generation. We need a special set of skills and knowledge practices to be able to empower and support learners with their own digital practices. We also need to think about how we support those emerging skills that students and young people have.

Thriving in a Digital World with Technologies

I have said that digital literacies are about the capabilities that let us live, learn and work, and that having them or not, would have a lifelong and lifewide impact. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) agrees that digital skills in particular, are going to transform lives and drive economies. That goes back to what I said earlier: As individuals and as whole communities and societies, we need to thrive through the use of these technologies.

Whatever the subject you are teaching in schools, there will be profound changes to how we research, how we teach, how we come to know and how we develop an identity as a teacher – all these things are changing rapidly. We have all been through a very difficult 15 months and I am very sure we could all point to the things that have changed for us in the ways we live, learn and work.

When I think about living today, I think about the kind of global shocks that are coming at us during this pandemic. And I think about how, with our technologies, we have found new ways of coming together socially through the use of technologies. But with these technologies also come new risks to our social cohesion – fake news, conspiracy theories, etc.

Thinking in a Rapidly Changing World

Now I’m going to talk a little bit about some of the ways that how we think might be changing in this rapidly changing world. I am sure some of you might have your own ideas and research about this so these are just kind of provocations for you to think about.

The first way of thinking I want to talk about is computational thinking – something we will be very familiar with. Algorithms and heuristics are things we may think of as being inside computers, but I’m sure they also are in your classrooms and you’re beginning to help your students to think about how computers work, how algorithms work. It isn’t just about understanding how to code but also about understanding what is happening when coding takes place; how we can understand also what happens when big datasets are put to use and how those datasets might in some instances be biased or might not show us the whole picture.

The second kind of thinking is design thinking. Now, teaching is a form of design – we think ahead about our students’ needs and how we might be able to meet them by understanding their learning patterns and providing them with learning activities. So teachers are essentially functioning like designers – planning, designing, doing and making. And increasingly, in most parts of the economy, design thinking will be used as a form of applied knowledge. So one of the things that our young people will be gathering through design thinking will be sort of spatial and visual literacy, which is very different from to just reading an extended text. Design thinking requires them to understand the audiences, the user experience and how things are put together.

Finally, the last kind of thinking is immersive thinking. What does it mean to be able to be in a fully immersed environment where learning occurs in a sensory-rich way? This image comes from a recent exhibition at the Singapore Science Center that I liked – I thought it was really evocative of what it might be like to learn in an incredibly immersive and sensory fashion. If we are able to string together images, photographs and videos into a montage, our students can have a really rich and sensory-filled experience of the topics we want them to learn. But this is another, completely different way of coming to understand the world – it has its own limitations as well as its opportunities.

Living in an Endemic Tech World

What does this mean for us? This pandemic has made us experience global shocks and radical changes in how we work and live. We have little choice but to share our lives with technologies. Any kind of digital literacy framework that we might come up – and indeed any curriculum – is in some ways a story about the future. We are telling a story to ourselves and our young people about the kind of future they’re going to live in, and what they will need to thrive there.

So as educators, we have this extraordinary responsibility to do that thinking with our young people in a very transparent way and in a way that empowers and involves them. Living with uncertainty means creating new ways that we can be resilient which brings me to the question: What does digital resilience mean? For me, it means looking after each other’s well-being in new ways.

I know in Singapore, you have this concern for all these different issues that might be impacting on your young people and on your older people as well – issues around cyber bullying and your digital footprint.

So cyber resilience is about how we can flourish in a highly screen-based world in a highly screen-based society. We have to understand the risks and how we can mitigate them. More importantly, it is also how we can make our young people aware of these without disempowering and frightening them – because they need to take charge of this digital world. We need to focus also on not just how we think online, but how we feel online and how we make each other feel, and how we can develop new relationships virtually.

With technologies, one of the key things that resilience comes from would be our values. Technologies will constantly change how the world works but the values we have can stay more or less steady. We have to make sure that all the systems we are using have human beings at the center and in the heart of them. And this is a conversation we can also begin to have with our young people.