Crafting Data Literacy: Higher Education Teachers' Unique Learning Ecologies

Learning to “live well with data”, as Pangrazio and Sefton-Green put it, is a clear call to learn about data in all its complex nuances in our societies. In this context, the professional learning necessary for effectively interacting with educational data in higher education is undoubtedly at the forefront. In this chapter, we explore the skills requested of higher ed teachers to deal with data, and how these abilities can be achieved inside different educational contexts. By digging deeper into the diversified “data practices” and the approaches to achieve knowledge about the many facets of data in higher education, the authors will attempt to support the thesis that there is no single pathway or via maestra to achieve data literacy for teaching and learning. Analyzing three different academic contexts (two European and a Latin American one), the authors identified three subjects’ clusters that differ in their level of engagement toward data literacy practices, and then in their overall level of DL. Stemming on the concept of lifelong learning ecologies, we posit that it is necessary to understand practices and dispositions, as well as it is crucial to shed light on what the actors do to carry out such practices, more than applying literacy frameworks and impose training based on a top-down idea of what good data literacy is or can be.