Curricular challenges for the development of digital competency. An analysis of digital citizenship building in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay

• In Event: Digital futures and schooling: between global debates and regional experiences

Proposal

The paper analyses the emergence of Digital Competency (DC) as a response to AI literacy needs from the Latin American perspective of the socio-technical transition, comparing Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. We ask whether it is possible to build critical AI literacy considering the reception conditions in these countries.
DC has emerged as a new type of citizenship enacted in digital environments. It is about enjoying the same rights and obligations in digital environments; the "real virtuality" people enjoy in "real reality." DC has emerged as a concern on the educational agenda.
DC programmes are content (printed texts, courses, websites, videos) designed for non-formal education promoted by NGO activism and for formal education designed by scholars and/or promoted as new curricula by national governments and international organisations. They inherit the mission of previous digital literacy initiatives such as data literacy and, more recently, AI literacy and the computational thinking curriculum approach.
The curriculum projects collectively identified as necessary changes in content, knowledge, and skills are expressions of socio-technical imaginaries (visions of socio-technical futures) that construct alternative education-technology frameworks for a given society at a given time (Artopoulos, 2023; Jasanoff & Kim, 2015; Rahm, 2023).
Its growth and expansion followed a north-south path, from global education policy centres to the Global South. As the DC curriculum approach travels distances and "descends" towards school micro-contexts, it loses strength and capillarity due to the reception conditions.
In Latin America, the impact is lower due to the scarcity of publications on these issues, the difficulties in accessing materials in English due to language barriers among teachers, and the weakness of educational policies that no longer encourage the local production of materials. Latin American democracies have vulnerabilities of weak links in the global curricular knowledge circulation networks.
Using synchro-diachronic mapping methodology, we attempt to reconstruct the network of social actors attempting to assemble responses to the social impacts of AI platform adoption from macro to micro levels. We analyse patterns of emergence, such as critical computational thinking, powerful translation opportunities for incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) learning into citizenship building, the limitations of assemblages and their ethical implications.

Author

• Alejandro Artopoulos, Universidad De San Andrés