School Culture Transformation toward a Digital Literacy Culture: A Case Study on Building Students' Self-Directed Learning Culture
Keywords:
School Culture Transformation; Digital Literacy Culture; Self-Directed Learning; Teacher Digital Competence; Educational Change ManagementAbstract
The acceleration of educational digitalization forces schools to reshape their underlying organizational culture, yet how this shift builds self-directed learning remains underexplored. This study examines how school culture transformation toward digital literacy fosters students' self-directed learning culture, alongside the mechanisms and enabling conditions sustaining this change. Utilizing a qualitative case-study design through systematic document analysis, this research synthesized peer-reviewed empirical studies published between 2021 and 2025 using thematic coding and data triangulation. Findings reveal, first, that cultural transformation functions as a staged organizational process involving vision alignment, competence development, and iterative review. Second, digital literacy serves as the operative mechanism converting technological access into self-directed learning behavior by enhancing initiative, self-regulation, and engagement. Third, sustaining this transformation requires the synergistic alignment of teacher digital competence, distributed instructional leadership, and an independence-oriented curriculum framework. The study concludes that a self-directed learning culture is not an automatic outcome of digitalization but an intentionally cultivated result requiring integrated cultural, pedagogical, and leadership change. Theoretically and practically, these insights offer valuable guidance for school leaders, teacher professional development, and digital-literacy curriculum design.
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