The Changing Role of Social Responsibility for Educators

Educators have a social responsibility to young learners and as technology advances that role has changed.  It has always been the role of educators to ensure that the students under our tutelage have the knowledge to be good citizens and are successful. Gangone (2019) states that educating students means creating new knowledge in our young children. As educators we need to teach children how to grow and succeed while also caring for those around them. Every word that we speak creates new knowledge, and every piece of technology we use creates new knowledge. We need to be mindful and ensure that what we are saying and what we are using ensures that our students will not only be successful but will also be socially responsible themselves.  Therefore, we need to teach students their own responsibility to citizenry (Gangone, 2019).

But technological advances have changed how to be socially responsible educators. Not only do we need to teach students knowledge to be successful and how to be good citizens, but we also need to teach them how to learn in our new world of information technology. Information is readily available, but young learners may not always be able to understand or interpret information. It is not just our job now as educators to teach students information. They can get information just by googling! It is our social responsibility to teach students how to interpret information and apply it. Du Toit-Brits C. (2019) states that student-directed learning is important because technology and information is impossible to keep up with and that students now need skills to collaborate and also at the same time be empowered.

References

Gangone, L.M. (2019). Educators and social responsibility: What this means to informed citizenry. AACTE. https://aacte.org/2019/08/educators-and-social-responsibility-what-this-means-to-informed-citizenry/

Du Toit-Brits, C. (2019). A focus on self-directed learning: The role that educators’ expectations play in the enhancement of students’ self-directedness. South African Journal of Education., 39(2), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.15700/saje.v39n2a1645