Our manifesto makes the point—in different ways—that technology cannot be seen simply to determine how teaching will be done. Here we foreground one particularly damaging aspect of the deterministic language that has been regularly used to define students, the ways they learn, and the ways they should be taught. We argue that the highly problematic metaphor of the digital native is still too regularly used, continuing to negatively shape the way we understand the challenge of teaching online. Our argument is built around a critique of the essentializing nature of this term.
In defining what we mean by essentializing, we draw on the work of Hamilton and Friesen (2013) and their strong critique of digital education research from the perspective of science and technology studies. They describe digital education as being overly dependent on two simplistic, commonsense understandings of the nature of technology: the essentialist and the instrumentalist. Where instrumentalism sees technology as a neutral entity by which preexisting goals (for example, better learning) can be pursued, essentialism attributes to technology a set of “inalienable qualities” inextricably embedded within the technology itself (1). This kind of essentialism constructs a version of educational technology as separate from its social contexts, reducing the complex entanglements of the technological and social to a relationship of subordination: learning can be transformed by the built-in pedagogical value of certain technologies simply by allowing itself to be driven by them. Examples of this discourse common in contemporary ed-tech terminology include “unleashing the power of AI/data/IoT (etc.) to enhance learning” or “harnessing automation to scale education.” The political implications of such calls to “innovate” are elided, as the technology is mythologized and essentialized.
Social scientists across many fields have shown how essentialist ideas play out in social contexts. For Kadianaki and Andreouli (2017), for example, the term refers to “ways of representing social categories as if they possessed an underlying essence, a fixed property, which determines the attributes of the members of these categories” (837). This essentialism of social categories is the frame by which we consider the metaphor of digital natives and immigrants here. To speak of digital natives is to use a reductive, essentializing category to describe entire generations. It is a metaphor that has been damagingly formative to the field of digital education, and it persists despite the large body of empirical research that has debunked it.
Posited most famously by Prensky (2001a) in a highly speculative commentary piece, the idea that there are essential differences between digital natives and digital immigrants, and in how different generations approach digital technologies, has remained influential in popular thinking about digital education and digital selfhood more generally. At any time, it is possible to search the news and find recent mobilizations of it, particularly in the business sector and in popular framings of governmental and supragovernmental policy. At the time of writing, the phrase had appeared in the preceding twenty-four hours in the UK Daily Telegraph (Turner 2018), an interview on the Forbes website (Munford 2018), and in a speech by European Union commissioner Mariya Gabriel (European Commission 2018).
In its reduction of complex social and technological change to a crude binary, the term continues to have a seductive appeal on first encounter, and an immediate resonance that predates Prensky’s use of it. However, it is also deeply problematic in the way it marginalizes the professionalism of the teacher while normalizing a set of dangerously deterministic and colonialist metaphors. It proposes that young people have grown up in world where digital technology is ubiquitous, so they are naturally skilled with new digital technologies and spaces, while older people will always be a step behind and apart in their dealings with the digital. It further suggests that young learners’ immersion in digital technologies prompts a new approach to learning, one that is concerned above all with dispositions aligned to the market rather than to conventional scholarship: speed of access, instant gratification, impatience with slowness, and dependence on the ability to multitask. Teachers in this context have often been described as having a duty to adapt their methods to this new way of learning, being required, in fact to reconstitute themselves according to the terms of the “native” in order to remain relevant and, presumably, employable.
Commentators and researchers have long considered the impact of new technology and media on young minds. Television drew negative attention for its impact on children and families in the 1970s (Winn 1977; Mander 1978) and more positive attention as “a primer on living in a discontinuous, cut-and-paste reality” in the 1990s (Rushkoff 1994, 124). By the late 1990s, digital culture was being subjected to similar kinds of commentary. In 1996 media analyst Douglas Rushkoff dubbed the children of the cyberage “screenagers” and compared them with the children of immigrants:
Consider any family of immigrants to America. Who learns the language first? Who adopts the aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual values of their new host nation? The children, of course. . . . Well, welcome to the twenty-first century. We are all immigrants to a new territory. (Rushkoff 1996, 2)
A few years later, Prensky developed these ideas by adopting terminology used in the 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow, who had observed of his imagined audience, “You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants” (Barlow 1996). Prensky’s two-part 2001 article, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” consolidated Barlow’s natives and immigrants metaphor in the public imagination and sparked a decade of academic debate and research. A large number of critiques appeared at the end of the 2000s (Helsper and Eynon 2010; Brown and Czerniewicz 2010; Jones et al. 2010; Selwyn 2009a; Hargittai 2010) questioning the evidence for the existence of digital natives in the (for the most part) university classroom. Bennett, Maton, and Kervin (2008), surveying the generational claims of Prensky and others, found a “clear mismatch between the confidence with which claims are made and the evidence for such claims” and saw “much of the current debate about digital natives [as] an academic form of moral panic” (782), one that unnecessarily established divides between different generations, between the technically adept and those who were not, between learners and teachers, and between “those who believe in the digital native phenomenon and those who question it” (782–783).
Prensky grounded his argument that young brains were being physically changed by new technologies in sketchily applied evidence from neurobiology and social psychology, emphasizing the brain plasticity that neuroscience has popularized in more recent years (Eagleman 2011; Ramachandran 2012). Clearly, immersing ourselves in a new information environment teaches us new skills and ways of thinking; if this were not the case, no form of education could teach us anything new. As we argue throughout this book, the social and the material are emergent with each other and indivisible. But this does not mean that the ability to learn through new media is a phenomenon embedded in the essence of what it means to be young.
The use of digital technologies and environments has become so much more widespread in the past two decades that we can see that spending large parts of our lives online changes us whatever our age. The flexibility that Prensky and others observed in the young in relation to new technology seems little more than an openness to explore it without prejudice. As digital technologies have become ubiquitous, we have all explored and adapted, and we continue to do so as the technology continues to change. Our manifesto’s question about digital natives then is intentionally ambiguous and provocative. It is not only an inquiry (to which the answer, so far, is no), but a plea: Can we please stop talking about digital natives? To justify this, we consider here some fundamental critical objections to the term itself.
A central discomfort over the digital natives metaphor, and its flip side, the digital immigrant, relates to the notion of indigenousness or indigeneity: that is, that a native is indigenous to a specific place, or of that place, in a way that immigrants are not and cannot ever be. There are connections here with debates surrounding the relationship between settlers and indigenous peoples in postcolonial societies, labels that scholars argue are imprecise and complicated (Mamdani 2001; Davis 2017; Radcliffe 2017).
Mamdani (2001), one of “Africa’s first generation of postcolonial intellectuals” (651), points out that in colonial Africa, “natives were said to belong to ethnic [cultural] groups; non-natives . . . were identified racially [i.e., in biological terms, as white], not ethnically” (654). There are parallels here with the essentialism that describes all older people as digital immigrants, under an assumption that age, and therefore biology, trump personal experience, while younger people are imbued with a digital ethnicity by virtue of the technological culture that surrounds them. The digital natives/immigrants binary, however, inverts the colonial hierarchy, with digital skill, and thus power, seen to lie with the indigenous. Here, again, are parallels with Mamdani’s portrait of postcolonial Africa, where “mainstream nationalists reproduced the dual legacy of colonialism. This time around, though, they hoped to privilege indigenous over nonindigenous citizens” (658).
Mamdani suggests that colonialism’s crime was “to politicize indigeneity, first as a settler libel against the native, and then as a native self-assertion” (664). He seeks to prevent the proliferation of ethnically defined states and native authorities in postcolonial Africa by challenging the idea that we must define political identity, rights, and justice primarily in relation to indigeneity. As we have suggested, the category of digital native also fragments over time as waves of new technology shape successive generations of students differently. Challenging the dichotomy itself is surely, as for Mamdani, “the only way out” (663).
The complexities and sensitivities of the label of “native” in colonial and postcolonial societies prompt us to ask whether such concepts have any place in the digital realm. There are no first inhabitants from time immemorial of virtual spaces, only waves of newcomers over the past fifty or sixty years. Today’s children are still born analogue. Many are, to different degrees, now raised digital, but the psychological and cultural differences this creates between them and their parents ought not be overstated. Digital skill and worldview are learned, not innate, and middle-aged immigrants of today have had far longer to learn them than their school-age children.
This less-used “digital immigrant” terminology has particularly unfortunate connotations at this current political moment, when immigration is being demonized by political populists throughout the world. Immigrants are cast in the popular imagination as never truly belonging to their adopted country, never being able to say that they are at home there—a charge that can become self-fulfilling. The immigrants of Prensky’s dual metaphor may have receded somewhat into the background of popular commentary, but as long as the natives metaphor persists, then immigrants are present by implication.
In 2011 we explored the tensions inherent in this binary for teachers at a time when most were being cast as digital immigrants (Bayne and Ross 2011). We pointed out that by placing so-called digital natives in the “commanding position” and their immigrant teachers as “perpetually lacking and in need of development” (162), uncritical users of the terms effectively delegitimized and deprofessionalized teachers, and at the same time neutralized teachers’ resistance to technology, however sound the reasons for that resistance might be. Any critique of technology, its role in education, or its implementation, we argued, as long as it comes from an “immigrant,” can be quickly compartmentalized as belonging to a marginal, illegitimate voice.
We argued then, as now, that this discourse had—and still has—a paradox at its heart that is damaging for teachers. It normalizes a deeply essentializing vision of selfhood as determined by generational positioning, while also presenting an imperative for teachers and other professionals to constantly change and develop in order to remain relevant. It asks teachers to accept a position that is in permanent deficit and permanently precarious. Since the turn of this century and the emergence of the native/immigrant binary, we have seen this digital normalization of deficit and precarity become massively amplified with more recent waves of technological change. The global reworking of economies through the so-called fourth industrial revolution (Schwab 2016) and the promised upending of conventional understandings of professionalism by automation and datafication confront us with acute challenges as teachers, some of which we address in this book. Within such a context, it is surely time to move away from simplistic binaries to challenge essentializing and reductive ways of thinking about technological change, to look to diversity rather than dichotomy as we try to understand what it means to teach in a digital society. Can we stop talking about digital natives?
Conclusion: Valuing Complexity, Valuing the Teacher
Part I has provided an overview of some of the key ideas and arguments underpinning the Manifesto for Teaching Online, while addressing five particular statements:
First, we used theories of sociomateriality and posthumanism to argue that teaching is a complex bringing together of people, text, images, sounds, locations, discourses, technologies, and modalities, by which we are able to open up practice to difference and critique. The highly situated, contextually contingent, and emergent properties of such gatherings enable multiple enactments of good teaching, not a homogenizing, normative goal of best practice. We argued instead for contextually sensitive teaching that seeks ways to acknowledge the materiality of the digital in digital education.
Then, by providing an overview of dominant contemporary digital education policies, trends, and trajectories, we argued that we can do better. By developing new conceptual and practice frameworks built around a critical sensibility that relishes complexity, we can move beyond the instrumental logics that have dominated digital education to date. Key to these practices will be a strong assertion of the value of the teacher and a focus on the importance of teachers’ professional judgment and creativity, at a time when it risks being downgraded by the reductionist tendencies of contemporary ed-tech.