Digital Literacy Presents Adult Education With Unique Struggle

While navigating everyday life without digital literacy is becoming harder to do, navigating education without it is becoming impossible. The U.S. Department of Labor even defined digital literacy as a funding-eligible goal for workforce preparedness programs 10 years ago, via the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014. But for adults who aren’t comfortable with technology, adult education programs cannot always guarantee help.

A recently published qualitative study of adult education programs by Texas A&M University (TAMU) researchers found some adult education programs rely on one person for all their IT needs, regardless of the person’s official job. Some don’t have reliable Internet access or up-to-date, secure equipment. Whether or not they have equipment, researchers found, teachers may not have strong digital literacy skills themselves, making it hard to teach those skills to others.

Glenda Rose, who has worked in the Texas education system for 25 years, led the study — Program Directors’ Perspectives on Technology Integration in Adult Education and Literacy Classrooms — at the Texas Center for the Advancement of Literacy and Learning (TCALL) at TAMU. Six years ago, she and a team of students and staff noticed that technological integration in adult education and literacy programs was under-researched. To learn more, they started with a survey of adult education teachers, asking basic questions like, “What kinds of technology do you have access to?” and “What do you use in your classrooms?”

The responses were so wide ranging that the team decided to conduct more in-depth interviews with program directors. While technology deserts affect education at all levels, the team found that the structure of adult education brings unique challenges.

At a very basic level, the programs struggle with access to technology. One interviewee said, “Our challenge is funding … not having enough computers for every student, and not having Internet access at all the locations.” None of the program directors interviewed for the study were identified by name.

The research team conducted interviews before the COVID-19 pandemic heightened the need for digital literacy. Since then, Rose said, tech is a higher priority at the state level, citing the Affordable Connectivity Program and increased funding for things like laptops and smart boards in the classroom. But Amanda Higgins, a graduate student who worked on the study, said integrating tech into adult education is not as simple as buying new equipment.

Unlike K-12 and traditional higher education institutions, adult education often does not take place in a school, she said, but somewhere that minimizes commute times and cost.

“Maybe I'm going to set up a classroom at an apartment complex, one at a church and one at a community college,” she said. “Well, naturally, the community college is going to have more resources. They're going to have computers. They're going to have Internet. The church may not have Wi-Fi, the church may not have smart boards — the church may only have papers and markers.”

Further, instructors working in borrowed spaces like a church may not have permission to use their host’s technology or to store their own. And, Rose said, some programs struggle to maintain equipment once it’s been procured.

One program director said, “Our program is using 10-year-old computers predominantly in rural areas, and we don’t have enough funds to replace them.”

Whether or not they have equipment, 90 percent of adult education teachers in Texas work part time at a maximum of 19 hours per week, according to the study. For teachers to learn to incorporate technology into their classroom and instruction, they might need to trade instructional time that week for professional development.

Most adult education teachers in Texas are current or retired K-12 teachers, some of whom chose to retire because working with new technology was overwhelming, Rose said.

Outside of official professional development, some program directors noted that IT staff can help train other staff members. However, smaller adult education programs relied on their own instructors and staff for tech help, rather than IT professionals.

“I only have seven teachers. They just holler at me and ask, 'How do you do this?' and I show them how to do it,” one interviewee said.

Successfully incorporating digital literacy into existing courses can be a challenge as well, Higgins said. Some programs teach classes on specific technology skills, such as Microsoft Office and typing skills, while others incorporate such topics into existing courses, like creating charts in Excel in a math course.

Regardless, teaching digital skills to a class with vastly different backgrounds and baselines can be difficult. Unlike traditional education, where students are grouped by age and developmental stage, adult learners run the gamut in age and previous education experience.

Grouping by grade in the K-12 system, for example, “simplifies curriculum because you can design curriculum for that age and stage,” Higgins said. “But in adult education, people are coming in from all walks of life, from varying levels of education. Some people are coming in and they haven't been in school since maybe fourth or fifth grade, eighth or ninth grade. Some people are coming in with different English proficiency. That is another curveball, perhaps, for an educator.”

Both Higgins and Rose said that adult education is not always considered with the same weight or esteem as traditional education pathways, but they emphasized that teaching digital literacy in those programs is essential.

“We're not just teaching digital literacy for digital literacy’s sake,” Rose said. “It's because it's tied to their ability to participate in society and participate in economic stability.”

*This story originally ran in the Center for Digital Education, which is part of the Government Technology family and a sister publication to Industry Insider — Texas.