What is the Future of Digital Citizenship?

As the world around us changes, how are schools moving forward to help kids navigate new 21st Century challenges?

One thing is clear: most schools can’t keep up. This concern - plus innovative solutions for schools, teachers, and businesses - were a focus of this year’s ASU+GSV Summit, an annual gathering hosted by Arizona State University (ASU) and Global Silicon Valley (GSV) that connects leading minds focused on transforming society and business around learning and work.

There is a lot of potential to scaffold the skills that kids really need to succeed in the modern world. The Rethinking Digital Citizenship panel, a conversation between Linda Burch from Common Sense Media (an organization that recently worked closely with Endless on The Endless Key) Richard Culatta from ISTE/EdSurge, and Sophia Mendoza from the Los Angeles Unified School District, explored the ways that teacher are integrating modern digital literacy curriculum into schools.

What is Digital Literacy?

When most people think about digital literacy and citizenship, they think about privacy: how do I keep my passwords safe, my kids from accessing dangerous content, and my family away from financial scams? 

While this is certainly a good way to start thinking about digital citizenship, in today’s technology and internet-reliant world, it needs to be expanded in the classroom. 

To further define what digital citizenship means, Culatta asks: “how do you use your access to the digital world to engage with your community, to have your voice be heard?” The focus has shifted away from security and privacy to a larger emphasis on civic and social engagement, explains Mendoza.

Since technology is everywhere, it’s important to translate good citizenship skills to the virtual world. Culatta explains that we have to “[practice] what these skills look like in a virtual space, how to intervene, how to act, how to make a change, how to call out inappropriate [actions and] misinformation, how to ask whether something is legitimate or not.”

“I want to bring about this urgency that digital citizenship is now embedded in all content areas, leverage it for wherever you are in that K-12 space,” says Mendoza. It doesn’t have to be a new subject added into curricula, it can be weaved into topics teachers are already focusing on.

How Has It Changed?

Common Sense Media, who have worked in the digital citizenship space for about a decade, have seen the way it’s evolved over the years: from managing cyberbullying to responding to hate speech to issues around identity development and race and representation in the media, kids are engaging in the digital world constantly, tethered to their devices. According to Birch, “the biggest new focus in work in digital citizenship is around media and news literacy, elevating it again to a place where it really belongs in the center of this work…in the context of leaning into civic learning and into the dispositions that kids need to be able to communicate across differences online [and] have good civil online discourse.”

What Does It Look Like in Practice?

Common Sense has created lessons including media creation and expression “so that young people have an opportunity to use their voices in a reflective way.” Partnering with Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Common Sense created Digital Passport, a curriculum all about digital dilemmas and thinking routines that presents “thorny” issues that may not have a clear right and wrong answer - do you post or repost a video that includes violence? Can you predict the effect an online post or message might have on someone's reputation?

The lessons encourage kids to “slow down and reflect, to take different perspectives with empathy and curiosity, to try to lean into evidence around an issue, to then really think about how they want to put themselves out in the world. And finally, then to take action.”

Looking Forward

So what does the future of digital citizenship look like? Birch hopes that social and emotional learning will be further integrated to help kids build empathy around their interactions with other people, on- and offline.

Parents, caregivers, and communities need to be empowered with ways to support kids in building these schools - we can’t just provide lists of “do nots” when it comes to being responsible on the internet; we need to be clear about the expectations for “dos.”

Check out the full panel for more examples, reflections, and a deeper look into how this can take shape in schools: Rethinking Digital Citizenship