Digital citizenship empowers us to be productive and responsible users of digital technologies while digital literacy allows us to be critical users of digital media. Associate Professor Antero Garcia – notable for his research in technology and gaming – from Stanford University in the United States of America shares more about how teachers can integrate both skills into their teaching and their students’ learning.

What Is Digital Citizenship?

At the risk of being a bit aloof, I’m not entirely sure I know what digital citizenship is at this present moment in the late summer of 2022. If citizenship is the state of formal affiliation with a particular territory, country, or community, in what environment does “digital citizenry” reside and what kinds of responsibilities are taken up by inhabitants in these spaces?

I realize this may sound like a pedantic response, so let me offer a bit more specificity: For better and worse, citizenry implies a community to which one maintains social ties. Those may not be felt deeply within a large country (such as the United States where I am writing this), and there are certainly fissures in how we connect and communicate.

A digital citizen is, perhaps, someone who has affiliation with others in and across digital domains and, perhaps, stewards safe and civil practices for other community members in these domains. This is about building trust, maintaining happiness, and reducing acts of harm for individuals in online spaces.

Oftentimes, digital spaces are seen largely as areas for the consumption of multimodal products such as texts, films, memes and social media posts. We (including my own research) point fingers at algorithms and large corporations for the insidious practices that shape what happens in these online places. However, digital citizenry requires us to recognize not just the savviness required in how we consume and curate media for ourselves and others, but also how we produce new media products constantly.

How Can Teachers Foster Digital Citizenship in the Classroom?

Fostering digital citizenship in classrooms requires considering the productive practices of students just as intentionally as their consumptive practices. It requires focusing less on singular tools and more on the kinds of holistic contexts of online engagement. It requires a recognition that, even several decades into a digital and online pivot in our daily lives, most adults have poor digital practices; our relationships with technology, distraction and online engagement continue to cause emotional, social and political fissures within our communities.

Knowing we are so often wrong, means that the community we kindle in our classrooms must be built on communal trust – that we are all working together to be better digital citizens. This work requires knowing that sometimes, often even, young people will need to lead.

How Can Teachers Better Integrate Digital Literacy Skills into Student Learning?

I worry that digital literacy skills have become an add-on to a robust and overly-assessed set of curricula in schools right now; that’s certainly what I see in many U.S. contexts. Integrating digital literacy skills means being deliberate with these practices at every stage of instruction.

For example, when curating which texts are read, how might students identify products in online spaces that are useful – since a lesson on polynomials, or the scientific method, or literary analysis, or climate change all have countless valuable texts floating amidst the random detritus of online media? How might we set up classrooms for students to help discover such gems (at least some of the time)?

And, returning to a theme mentioned above, having students produce rich, digital products is imperative. That essay you might assign? Why can’t it be produced as a series of explicated memes?How might you have students demonstrate their understanding of the periodic table of elements via TikTok? Could you re-enact a key moment in history as a set of group chat texts amongst “besties”? Again, you might be uncertain what these kinds of digital literacy skills look like for kids these days. This is why we need to ask students and create an environment where they feel safe responding and taking risks in expressing their genius.

What Types of Support Do Teachers Need in this Pedagogical Shift to Include Digital Literacy?

Teachers need reassurance that they won’t be penalized for following students down the roads of online engagement that they like to explore. If teachers are going to respond to the current contexts of students today, they need to know they have the safety to do so and the trust of school leaders to use their expertise.

Teachers also need time to learn and to explore how digital literacy practices are shifting – many of the assumptions about credibility and fact-checking in online contexts have changed substantially in the past few years.

Finally, teachers need to have the ability to communicate and create with one another. One of the best things about being a teacher is sharing a passion and expertise for learning and particular subject matter. Teachers can create curriculum, public-facing explanations, and co-constructed texts with their colleagues and students if we provide the space and environment that encourage them to do so. The teachers I work with are often hungry for the opportunity to innovate. Schools need to let teachers explore and try out new ideas alongside their students.

Resource

Civic dimensions of critical digital literacies: towards an abolitionist lens

Antero Garcia & Roberto Santiago de Roock

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1554480X.2021.1914058