"Digital Formalism" and Its Criticism: A Case Study on the Development of Teachers' Education Abilities in the Digital Era

Abstract

Teachers' education abilities are related to the implementation of the fundamental task of"fostering virtue through education", and the advent of the digital age provides opportunities to empower such urgently needed abilities. Under the guidance of activity theory, this study adopts a case study method to explore the process and results of a teacher's development of education ability in the digital environment. The research found that teachers only use voice narration and chat record sharing for nonsystematic experience exchange, and the learning process in a closed environment lacks effective digital supervision, leading to the rigidity of teacher's educational cognition. In essence, the digitalization trend towards "administrative" rather than "professional" has led to a trend towards "digital formalism" of online teacher educational abilities development, resulting in issues such as the neglect of teacher development needs and the "symbolic implementation" of policies. Therefore, the development of educational abilities in the digital environment should take "education oriented digitalization" as the supporting concept, and a digital supervision system for teacher development that follows the logic of education should be constructed.

Keywords

• digital formalism
• teachers'education ability
• digitalization of education
• digital space
• digital supervision