A Teacher's Place in the Digital Divide

Over the last decade, the term digital divide has been widely used to indicate unequal access to digital technology. However, there are in fact many forms of social and educational inequality related to technology access and use rather than a single divide (for an overview, see Warschauer, 2003). In this chapter, I first explore five types of digital difference that impact teaching and learning, which I call school access, home access, school use, gender gap, and generation gap, and then discuss strategies that teachers and schools can use to help overcome these multiple divides. I explore these divides and ways to bridge them from the perspectives of sociocultural learning theory, which emphasizes how learning is shaped by broad social and cultural contexts, and critical literacy theory, which situates reading, writing, learning, and meaningmaking within the context of broader power differentials in schools and society.

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