Educators' data literacy: Understanding the Bigger Picture

In this chapter, I contend that there is need of a more complex perspective about data in the society and in education, in order to address holistic, integrated and critical educators’ professional practice. Indeed, there might not be a universal perspective on educators' data literacy that institutions and the system can embrace. Instead, my claim is that educators and institutions should engage in explorative approaches unveiling diversified dispositions to data. To support this assumption, I will introduce the results of 12 workshops (8 with English speaking participants, 3 with the Spanish speaking community and 1 in the Italian context) which I conducted from 2018 to 2020. Overall, nearly 294 amongst educators, PhD students and faculty professors participated. The methodology was held constant along the several workshops: I introduced several data practices in education and society, to trigger reflection about the educators' professional knowledge and practice. Moreover, I considered the workshops as part of hermeneutic circles where the conversation between me and the participants triggered understanding around educators' literacies to deal with situated data narratives and practices. This conversation unveiled the tensions between dispositions to data (reactive or proactive) and the forms of access to data (public or private), as spaces where the educators intervene. The data literacies required are diversified across these spaces, but they are also part of an integrated mosaic that can variate from a context to other. My ultimate consideration is that faculty, students and other stakeholders' efforts to develop data policies, strategies and practices, should not overlook the “bigger picture”