Diversifying Digital Learning: Online Literacy and Educational Opportunity

How does the digital divide affect the teaching and learning of historically underrepresented students?

Many schools and programs in low-income neighborhoods lack access to the technological resources, including equipment and Internet service, that those in middle- and upper-income neighborhoods have at their fingertips. This inequity creates a persistent digital divide―not a simple divide in access to technology per se, but a divide in both formal and informal digital literacy that further marginalizes youths from low-income, minoritized, and first-generation communities.

Diversifying Digital Learning outlines the pervasive problems that exist with ensuring digital equity and identifies successful strategies to tackle the issue. Bringing together top scholars to discuss how digital equity in education might become a key goal in American education, this book is structured to provide a framework for understanding how historically underrepresented students most effectively engage with technology―and how institutions may help or hinder students’ ability to develop and capitalize on digital literacies.

This book will appeal to readers who are well versed in the diverse uses of social media and technologies, as well as less technologically savvy educators and policy analysts in educational organizations such as schools, afterschool programs, colleges, and universities. Addressing the intersection of digital media, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic class in a frank manner, the lessons within this compelling work will help educators enable students in grades K–12, as well as in postsecondary institutions, to participate in a rapidly changing world framed by shifting new media technologies.

Contributors: Young Whan Choi, Zoë B. Corwin, Christina Evans, Julie Flapan, Joanna Goode, Erica Hodgin, Joseph Kahne, Suneal Kolluri, Lynette Kvasny, David J. Leonard, Jane Margolis, Crystle Martin, Safiya Umoja Noble, Amanda Ochsner, Fay Cobb Payton, Antar A. Tichavakunda, William G. Tierney, S. Craig Watkins

William G. Tierney is University Professor, Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education, and director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis in the Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California. He is the editor of The Responsive University: Restructuring for High Performance and Competing Conceptions of Academic Governance: Negotiating the Perfect Storm, both published by Johns Hopkins.

Zoë B. Corwin is an associate professor of research at the Pullias Center.

Amanda Ochsner is an assistant professor at the University of Findlay.