From Digital Poverty to Educational Equity: A Strategic Approach to Reforming Rural Education by Bridging the Digital Divide

• In Event: Addressing the digital divide through new interventions and programs

Proposal

Within Coahuila’s existing framework for education development, we examined system-level reform for sustainable education infrastructure in rural areas, with specific emphasis on bridging the digital divide and promoting global citizenship for students, teachers, and stakeholders within the education system. We found that introducing technology to rural areas can make significant progress towards closing the existing social inequality gap.

The future of education is bleak when underrepresented communities become excluded from the global landscape because of the inability to access the internet. Rural areas around the world suffer from the ever-growing digital divide that largely hinders education acquisition from early childhood to adult learners. Digital technology provides a wealth of economic, political, environmental, and educational opportunities that can reduce overall social inequality and provide the vital framework for a resilient future for the generations to come.
Coahuila, Mexico represents around 1,000,000 students, 53,000 teachers, and 6,000 schools across the state, most living within rural contexts. There are over 800 rural schools in the state, primarily in early childhood education, and over half do not have access to internet or technology. During the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020-2021 school year, around 28,000,000 students were displaced within the Mexican education system, with 5.2 million students across all grade levels discontinuing enrollment entirely. This combination of digital poverty and social-emotional isolation was nearly fatal for rural areas. In Coahuila, specifically, Secretary of Education, Emanuel Garza is currently leading ambitious reform efforts to address existing fractures in the system that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic—under resourced schools, declining democratic identity, low achievement standards, and corruption within the broader education ecosystem. The current strategy, Impulso Educativo Coahuila, frames education as a shared responsibility that involves a wide range of interest groups. The aim is to clearly diagnose the current situation, align and provide continuity of proposed strategies through various education levels, integrate systems-thinking in the design process, and validate the feasibility of the proposed efforts in the political, operational, and financial realms. Identified within the strategy are the community of stakeholders—families, educators, students, neighbors, and allies—and the main dimensions of analysis, which are categorized as “people”, “community”, and “planet”—representing Coahuila’s transformation to a global education system. Our team sought to examine how consolidating and more deeply integrating the lines of action that were delineated in the strategy would close the social inequality gap, namely by creating three priority areas and their throughlines. By developing a more streamlined framework, we found that this ultimately led to sustainable action that could permeate and replicate in low resourced communities similar to Coahuila, and for periods of time that endure the term limits of education leaders.
We created a framework to highlight 1) Institutional Development, 2) Rural Infrastructure, and 3) Global Education as the three pillars of the education system across rural communities. We focused on improving rural education communities as a way to boost Coahuila’s education system as a whole. We recategorized the lines of action into the three pillars as subcategories that can be combined and manipulated regardless of the financial, political, and social resources available at any given time. For example, “Institutional Development”, which included strengthening management systems and the culture of educational services, was a separate line of action from “Educational Infrastructure” and “Educational Leadership”—both of which involve improving school leadership, empowering changemakers in the education system, and dignifying the educational spaces of the learning communities. We prioritized Institutional Development, and subdivided Educational Infrastructure and Educational Leadership within that goal, to ultimately make for a more manageable framework to communicate to stakeholders, gather resources to initiate, and unify the education community to support this strategy. We further subdivided the remaining five lines of action into Global Education and Rural Infrastructure. All of which create a guide for sustainable education development prioritizing social-emotional learning, developing leadership for education changemakers from the bottom-up, harnessing technological development and expanding access to the digital world, and engaging communities inside and outside of Coahuila to rally around a brighter future.
In our framework, we placed special emphasis on technological development as a means of setting vital groundwork for the three pillars to be achieved. UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report for 2023 recently determined that introducing new technologies to the ever-growing digital divide can exacerbate existing social inequalities. However, our framework guides low resource communities to grow the system’s capacity for digital technology in an equitable and sustainable way that stimulates educational, social, political, and economic development throughout the whole system.

Authors

• Isabella Martin, Harvard Graduate School of Educatio

• Andrea Camarena