Soft Skills and Teacher Education in ICT-Mediated Environments in Latin American Higher Education: A Critical Literature Review

Abstract

The digital transformation of Latin American higher education has expanded the professional demands placed on university faculty and has shown that instrumental mastery of information and communication technologies (ICT) does not, by itself, ensure high-quality pedagogical mediation. In this context, soft skills become relevant as capacities that sustain communication, collaboration, critical thinking, emotional management, and teacher adaptability across face-to-face, virtual, and hybrid settings. This article aimed to critically analyze recent scientific literature on the relationship between soft skills and teacher education in ICT-mediated environments in Latin American higher education, identifying trends, tensions, findings, and research gaps. A critical literature review was conducted through a structured search of publications from 2021 to 2026, prioritizing peer-reviewed and indexed journal articles, systematic reviews, regional empirical studies, and reports from international organizations. Findings indicate that teachers’ digital competence and soft skills are closely related, although regional research frequently treats them as separate domains. Available evidence highlights that effective communication, collaborative work, critical thinking, emotional self-regulation, and adaptability shape the quality of educational interaction, methodological innovation, and student support in technology-mediated settings. Nevertheless, training approaches focused on tools, self-perception-based measurements, conceptual fragmentation, and limited longitudinal evaluation of training effects remain common. The review concludes that university teacher education requires comprehensive, continuous, contextualized, and assessable models that integrate digital, pedagogical, and socio-emotional capacities as an inseparable system for a humanly sustainable technological transformation.