Pedagogical Engineering to Develop Digital Fluency Among Pre- Service Teachers and Educational Leaders Of The 21 st -Century

The children in our classrooms today have advanced skills for texting their friends on their eTablets and cell phones, instant messaging chats to their peers, dialoguing on MySpace, Twitter or Facebook, surfing the web or playing Xbox or Wii games. These Y Gen, Net Gen, Millennials and Z Gen, Digital Natives, are the children of the digital generation. Unfortunately, most of the teachers in today’s classrooms belong to the pre-digital generation and are immigrants without the skills required for 21 st century digital fluency. Moreover, their classrooms are not engineered for a digital pedagogy. This has created a teacher-student-classroom mismatch, which at worst, is characterized by the tragedy of illiterate teachers teaching literate students and by the dilemma of teachers who find the present tense and the past perfect! Pedagogical engineering is urgently needed to develop the digital fluency of teachers so they can speak their students’ language. One way to achieve this is to engineer digital technologies into curriculum as discussed in this paper which reports the results of classroom trials conducted with over 400 undergraduate and 15 doctoral students by the author, in the last three years. The paper concludes that there is an urgent need to train pre-service teachers and educational leaders in digital fluency. Failure to do so will perpetuate the mismatch between digital savvy students and teachers stuck in the orthodoxy pedagogy of the last century.