Barriers to teachers using digital texts in literacy classrooms

TLDR

Although students are familiar with digital texts, their integration into literacy classrooms remains limited despite two decades of research and best practices. This study explores teachers’ reflections on digital text use to uncover why literacy teachers rarely incorporate such materials into routine instruction. Teachers frame barriers through institutional and societal discourses on home experiences, the conversion of print work into digital formats, and the need for technical computer skills, thereby partially mitigating obstacles to technology adoption.

Abstract

Abstract In many accounts of school literacy teaching and learning, there are claims that young people's familiarity with digital texts (ICTs) could provide teachers with opportunities to plan exciting and innovative activities. It would seem, however, that despite intensive research and exemplary practices over the last 20 years, the infiltration of ICTs into literacy classrooms is not widespread. This paper reports on one study where teachers discussed, argued and thought about their uses of digital texts in their classrooms. It provides some insight into the reasons why literacy teachers do not engage with digital texts as part of their everyday literacy activities. It also shows teachers using institutional and societal discourses about the value of students' home experiences to their schooling, the production of digital texts for presentation of print‐based work and the importance of technical knowledge about computers and new technologies, to describe and in part to overcome the barriers to using new technologies in their literacy classrooms.