Exploring Teachers’ Experiences of Digital Critical Reading Instruction in Secondary School Learning Environments in Indonesia

Abstract

Digital literacy has become a central concern in contemporary education as digital environments reshape how individuals engage with information, requiring new forms of critical reading competence. Within this evolving landscape, teachers’ experiences in navigating digitally mediated reading instruction remain understudied despite growing scholarly interest in the complexities of digital pedagogy. The specific phenomenon of how teachers interpret the emotional, cognitive, and pedagogical demands of teaching critical reading in digital contexts is still not well understood, raising the key question of how these experiences shape their instructional responses. Using an interpretative phenomenological approach, this study draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews with six secondary school teachers in Indonesia and reveals how teachers make sense of information overload, shifting student behaviors, and tensions between digital immediacy and reflective reading. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews and interpretative thematic analysis, the study shows that teachers experience digital critical reading instruction as a dynamic negotiation involving emotional strain, cognitive burden, and adaptive pedagogical reasoning; that they report three core experiential themes: (1) heightened emotional fatigue due to constant digital disruptions, (2) cognitive overload arising from fragmented digital texts, and (3) pedagogical adaptation characterised by the development of scaffolding techniques to foster deeper student engagement; that they develop personalized strategies to counter superficial reading habits; and that they construct meaning from these challenges in ways that influence their professional identities. These findings emerge from iterative coding, clustering of meaning units, and hermeneutic interpretation that illuminate the essence of teachers’ lived experiences in digital learning environments. The results enhance our understanding of digital literacy instruction by foregrounding the human experiences behind pedagogical decisions and highlighting the need for more reflective, experience-centered approaches in future research while offering concrete implications for teacher training and digital curriculum design.