The Evolving Role of the Teacher in the Digital Age
Professor in the Age of New Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
The New Technologies of Information and Communication (ICT) represent a radical shift in education, demanding specific knowledge and strategies to access new ways of acquiring information. Resources like television, video conferencing, and the internet keep the world informed without the barriers of time and space. However, the lack of necessary resources – economic, technical, or access to communication – creates significant disparities in education within this telematic environment.
The digital world and the information society are transforming how we work, communicate, think, and feel. This qualitative leap modifies teaching strategies and procedures for accessing and constructing knowledge. The educational challenge lies in equipping learners with the skills and strategies to thrive in this technological landscape.
Citizens of the knowledge society must acquire the ability to locate, identify, understand, apply, analyze, relate, synthesize, and evaluate diverse data to actively build their own knowledge and share it within the network of networks. Educational proposals must anticipate constant technological evolution, recognizing that teaching is not solely focused on knowledge transmission but on developing skills, abilities, and strategies that empower individuals to access accurate information and transform it into innovative and creative knowledge.
Integrating teaching and learning strategies focused on media and information allows us to incorporate them into the construction of innovative processes for change and improvement in teaching practices. The new school system in the information and experience age alters learning conditions and curriculum, including:
- Individual curricular adjustments to the pace of student learning
- Active multimedia/hypermedia learning
- Interactive telematic communication and cooperative learning environments
- Encouraging participation among students from different geographical areas, developing the ability to analyze and compare
- Promoting creativity and the ability to link areas of knowledge through the internet
Any proposed integration of new ICTs in education must stem from pedagogical considerations, not solely from technological resources. The number and diversity of these technological resources haven’t been seamlessly integrated with other curriculum elements, and these resources should extend beyond merely entertaining and motivational roles.
ICTs are justified as teaching resources when used to achieve goals and develop teaching strategies focused on the teaching-learning process. The teacher determines what, for whom, when, and which specific cognitive abilities will be attained using ICTs as mediators. Media doesn’t function as a monolithic entity but as a set of mediating variables that interact with general and specific learning across different knowledge areas.
The usefulness of media depends on the objectives to be achieved. As Cabero (1995:49-69) states: “Complementarity and involvement of the media must be a principle and strategy used by teachers when selecting and implementing instrumental design in the media.”
New technologies incorporated into educational innovation must be understood from the triple perspective articulated by Rivas (2000): as an activity performed to produce change, as the result of that change within the system, and as the instrument to be endorsed and integrated into the school to improve educational structures and processes, resulting in positive effects for students.
Innovation, as stated by Bartholomew (2001:70): “(…) the minor be given to the reproduction of knowledge, and increased emphasis to be given to developing skills in information development.”
Educational experiences focusing on technological innovation, according to Squire (1995: 173-74), should revolve around the review and assessment of potentially innovative developments in educational technology, curriculum integration in media, particularly new technologies, and demonstrate why, in what ways, and for what meanings and purposes the complex relationship between technology and educational innovation can and should be addressed today.
The introduction of any information and communication technology hinges on the teacher’s training for its incorporation into teaching practice and their attitudes towards it. The teacher is a key factor in introducing any innovation within the educational context. Therefore, training and retraining of teachers for the training and incorporation of New Information and Communication Technologies in the classroom is crucial.
An Innovative and Creative Teacher
Consequently, an innovative teacher will reward creative behavior and foster an innovative climate in their classroom.
Innovation in education should provide carefully planned change. According to Marcelo (1996:43-86), “Innovation is any process of planned change aimed at an improvement.” This means that while innovation involves change, not all change constitutes innovation, as it could have arisen spontaneously or unplanned.
Today’s society requires innovative, not reproductive, teachers who can intuit and create lines designing tomorrow’s education. To be good teachers, as Botkin et al. (1979:51) suggest, teachers must necessarily be future-oriented. “The best teachers are those who developed and manages to communicate a sense of future.”
Only teachers capable of experimenting, exploring, and discovering new lines of future society can prepare young people for a world that demands critical thinking skills regarding themselves and their surroundings, enabling them to reflexively judge various situations in a rapidly changing society.
This approach will promote more effective learning and the ability to question and inquire.
Pedagogical research must contribute to solving the problems posed by daily activity in the educational context. Arturo de la Orden (1995: 136-139) believes that the knowledge generated by educational research can influence practice and educational policy, as the appropriate transfer and use of results becomes a critical factor for innovation.
Teachers are required to promote creativity and help students form their own criteria against propaganda and pluralism, preparing them to participate in the process of change.
The Specialist Teacher in an Area of Knowledge
Teachers must possess knowledge of their subject matter and its methodology to present it engagingly. However, they also require a broader cultural vision to transcend rigid disciplinary boundaries and artificial divisions of knowledge. Considering all objectives, content, methods, structures, and common language will enable them to overcome the limited horizon of progressively independent scientific fields.
The interdisciplinary training of teachers must be present, with necessary diversification based on the subject, the learning process, or the teachable moment.
We should consider an educational culture that fundamentally looks to the future. Education should not solely transmit past culture and curate history for future generations. Neither should it solely focus on understanding the present, as it is fleeting. The present moment must serve as a teaching mechanism to explain change and thus achieve the objective of education: mobility and adaptation to the new and changing, so that education is conceived as the guiding instrument for future generations.
This involves transforming the classroom into real simulation labs, where computer media, game techniques, random forecasting, foresight, etc., become the pillars supporting teaching action, which can no longer rely solely on professional education.
This necessitates specific initial and continuing training for teachers to successfully develop their teaching tasks. No profession can meet social and personal demands solely with initial preparation, regardless of its success. Faculty updating is a hallmark of educational quality.
The Teacher Committed to the Whole Person
Above all other functions, the teacher must promote the personal growth of their students, addressing the whole person: intelligence, behavior, and emotions, educating themselves through their own training.
This commitment to the whole person encourages student self-esteem and a positive self-concept. The teacher committed to the whole person is sensitive to their students’ feelings, capable, valuable, establishes good relationships with them, and views their task as liberating rather than controlling.
Salvador Moreno (1979:49) understands the objectives and educator focusing on the person: “Promoting learner development of his personality, that is, learning to live their emotions and feelings that can adapt flexibly to the changing circumstances of his life, which is able to manage yourself, who can be and not only do you learn to use and develop their capacities and potentialities, to be creative and transform your world in what is in their power, that is able to reflect critically and realistically, you learn to learn from every experience, living in a discovery process of the knowledge and skills to solve problems that are going to face, to improve their interpersonal relationships with other and to collaborate and cooperate with other human beings, respect for their own individuality.”
The existence of a rapidly evolving culture creates complex challenges for our educational and social institutions, as well as for those who wish to lead them. Our knowledge base expands and connects to a wide range of alternative worldviews that provide relevant references for how we construct our own meaning of education, particularly in a technological, multicultural, multiethnic, and diverse social context. The challenge for aspiring educational leaders lies in adopting a social context approach to extract and process new perspectives.
Framing and imagining can help us envision future educational opportunities, but the challenge remains in putting these ideas into practice.
The ethical dimension of teaching is recognized by developing an activity aimed at training people. It should reflect and ensure the professional conduct of the educator. According to B?ezinka (1988: 283), “we can not educate at any price, nor can we afford to talk about without a commitment to ethical professionalism in our work.”