While some are advocating strongly for strict regulations such as the under-16 social media ban and classroom screen-time limits, opponents voice strong concerns regarding digital literacy, freedom of expression, and practical implementation.
Highlighting that he believes passive screen consumption is damaging focus, Education Minister Jason Clare has advocated for winding back screen time in classrooms to address foundational learning deficits, however many strongly disagree.
In response, more than 120 leading Australian experts and organisations have urged the Federal Governments, along with state and territory governments, to shift the debate from screen time to screen use in schools, warning that blanket restrictions risk undermining learning, digital literacy and educational equity.
The Position Statement has been led by University of Wollongong (UOW) researchers Dr Karley Beckman and Associate Professor Tiffani Apps from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child and developed with the Alannah & Madeline Foundation.
Apps’ research explores the digital practice of children and young people across everyday life and education contexts. She says her Centre of Excellence colleagues have long been discussing the quality of technologies in schools.
“My concern with saying, ‘let’s remove screens’ or ‘put a time limit on them’ is that we’re not actually addressing the quality component of this conversation, and in the letter we call for a national assessment and evaluation of tools that is open and transparent.”
Apps says there’s been an explosion of tools in the edtech market since the COVID pandemic that are underpinned by a data economy.
“That infrastructure really drives some pretty crappy tools in education, so it is a really important conversation to have - who is evaluating these tools, who’s responsible for it, and how is it happening in an open and transparent way?” she says.
While there are a number of initiatives that do those kinds of things, they’re not systematic, they’re often industry-led rather than by government or education, and they’re not open and transparent, the academic says.
“I think the problem with talking about digital detox and putting time limits on is it creates this kind of band-aid where the public or parents might feel like we’re doing something, but we’re not actually putting attention and investment into what we need to do to keep kids safe.”
The researchers involved in the position paper acknowledge concerns about screen use are valid but argue the screentime guidelines used to justify restrictions were not designed for schools.
Current screentime thresholds trace back to 1990s advice for toddlers and television and neither the World Health Organisation nor Australia’s 24-hour movement guidelines set a limit on learning-related screen use for children over five.
“Nobody's arguing that kids should be on devices all day, every day. The real questions are about the quality of education technologies we use in our schools, how we teach students to use these tools well and how we support teachers to meet students’ learning needs, interests and motivations,” Associate Professor Tiffani Apps says.
Apps contends that it doesn’t need to be an either-or situation. She suggests that teachers know that different children need different tools and they’re engaged in different ways in learning.
“Motivation and engagement is really key in switching kids on to be able to engage in those learning processes, and I think teachers need to be trusted and they need the autonomy to choose the right tools for the right students, for the right learning outcomes,” she explains.
“I feel like much of the conversation going on around this at the moment, and having been a school teacher and a technology coordinator and now an academic that explores this, I really understand, and I think it’s important to support our teachers in schools to make those decisions.”
Whether that means we resort to using pen and paper or a computer to engage in some instruction, it doesn’t need to necessarily be a debate, Apps argues.
“Maybe we need to just have a conversation about how we can protect children and support them to participate in this world that we’ve created for them safely,” Apps suggests.
“I spend my time thinking about this and advocating for children’s rights and I think engaging children and young people in these conversations is really something that’s missing and really important, and there’s definitely room to think about what we want education to look like.
“We’re kind of getting stuck in this binary around, ‘yes technology’ or ‘no technology’, but these questions are around the purpose of education and supporting children to engage safely and participate in the worlds that we have created for them and so that they may be able to recreate for themselves.”
Apps believes the focus of limiting screen time is far too blunt. It’s not about minutes, she says, it’s what these kids are doing with their screen time, why and with whom.
“Educators haven’t historically thought about screen time, we’ve always just thought about the tool and the pedagogy and the learning outcome and the children in front of us and that is already really well aligned with what we’re seeing coming out of the health research in how we can shape a quality experience with technology,” she shares.
“But it’s also well aligned with the educational technology research which we’ve seen over the last 15 years.
“We’re really thinking about ‘what is the purpose of using this tool and how will it benefit the children’, ‘are we learning about the tool or are we learning with the tool?’ and how are we building digital literacy alongside the learning outcomes as well?’.
Teachers, Apps shares, have historically done this well and the time is, in a way, a distraction.
“Because the nature of teachers’ work is it’s bound by lessons and there’s movement in that and we don’t really have a lot of data that shows that teachers are using technology for these long periods of time where we’re seeing that concern.”
Critically, blanket restrictions are possibly, in Apps’ opinion, only going to accentuate digital literacy gaps that are growing between children from privilege and those from diverse backgrounds and geographical locations.
“Teachers make high-quality professional judgments in their work every day and they need support to do that. Placing restrictive measures on them and taking their agency away is counterintuitive.
“It means that there’ll be trade-offs around how we’re using technology and the decisions won’t be made with the best pedagogical intention, and we’ll be trading off across the week, across the day, to fit in certain kinds of uses and digital literacy will have an impact.”
The children who have the most to lose are those from more diverse backgrounds and geographical locations, Apps says.
“We know that there are many kids and you can see in the NAP ICT data that, particularly in primary school, they’re learning their formal digital literacy in a school context and if we take that away, it becomes a problem, especially for our secondary colleagues.
“We’re just kicking that down the line really because if we’re not building digital literacy slowly and purposefully from kindergarten onwards, by the time they get to high school and they have more independent access to devices, they haven’t had the opportunity to build those skills and then that’s really going to create more of a problem in a high school setting where they’re not structure isn’t set up to deal with building those digital literacies and preparing students in that way.”
The full Position Statement can be viewed online here.
