INFUSING DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN CRITICAL LITERACY PEDAGOGY TO GENERATE CRITICAL THINKER

Abstract

Traditional skills such as literacy and numeracy skills, added with learning and innovation skills, career and life skills, and digital literacy skills are called the new learning paradigm. Those skills also align with the challenge for higher education institutions to develop curricula in the 4.0 industry era to produce graduates who have 21st-century skills, that is HOTS (high-order thinking skills), which covers communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creative thinking, computational logic, compassion, and civic responsibility. Students are digital natives, but technology implication limits their cognitive thinking potential when they depend too much on it that avoid thinking enhancing, discovering information, and problem-solving steps. Those constraints challenge teachers to emerge the student’s critical thinking abilities. This research aims to propose critical literacy using digital technology in shaping students to be critical thinkers and to promote that digital literacy is essential to ensure that technology is merely a support, not a substitute for teachers to achieve quality teaching practice. The research method is a case study since it produces an in-depth, multifaceted understanding of a complex problem in the actual setting of integrating technology and critical thinking skill. Infusing digital technology in critical literacy is essential to emerging critical thinking awareness since both are needed in the workforce. Packaging technology as a device to nurture students’ critical thinking in language instruction will help students select, gather, analyze, and evaluate effectively the extravagance of information in cyberspace.