BEHIND DIGITAL EDUCATIONAL POVERTY: THIRD LEVEL OF THE DIGITAL DIVIDE AS A CULTURAL DIVIDE BETWEEN STUDENTS AND TEACHERS – THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCES FROM AN ITALIAN CASE STUDY

Digital educational poverty, conceptualised by CREMIT in 2021, was defined from DigComp2.1 and a reformulation of the 4 dimensions consistent with those used to measure educational poverty: learning to understand, to be, living together, living an autonomous and active life. The concept of digital educational poverty holds together the 3 levels of the digital divide as proposed in the international academic literature. Although digital literacy poverty refers to the lack of digital skills to analyse the production and use of digital content, the aim of this work is to focus on other factors that contribute to this phenomenon. In particular, we want to explore the 'cultural' nature of digital educational poverty in terms of a 'gap' between the 'peripheral' generations of adults in relation to the difficulty of understanding the digital languages, meanings and practices of the younger generations. This is even more evident in formal educational contexts, where this cultural gap between teachers and students becomes a factor that can aggravate the digital educational poverty of the latter. Although DigCompEdu highlights the priority challenges for digital teacher education, the cultural dimension of this gap remains unexplored and, consequently, the training strategies to bridge this gap are implicit and undersized.