Executive Summary
The Teaching for Digital Citizenship project set out to co-design and evaluate new resources to address young people’s needs in a digitally connected world. Combining philosophical reflection, ethnography, and participatory action research in order to embed values-led pedagogy across the curriculum, we set out to:
- Understand the aims, challenges and practices of teaching for digital citizenship in secondary schools across the UK
- Develop a range of strategies, resources, and practices to help teachers, teacher educators, and students to shape ethical environments in the interfaces of the digital with personal, social, civic, and global citizenship
- Refurbish a workable and coherent moral education for the challenges of citizenship in the digital world.
Based on surveys and ethnography, we found that the aims and practices of teaching for digital citizenship are varied, with schools drawing on a variety of resources. While many excellent resources exist, the dominant sources of information tend to focus on protecting young people from a narrow range of ‘bad actor’ threats; we recommend a need to go further, to provide young people with tools of critical information literacy to understand how to make a positive contribution through their digital interactions.
According to teachers and young people, the key challenges faced by schools include challenges of inequality, procurement, lack of resources, and lack of agency over the choice of resources. Through our engagement in a range of policy initiatives, the project seeks to develop training materials for teachers, and support for the emerging range of para-professionals supporting digital provision in schools.
Together with our community of practice, we have developed a Self-Evaluation Framework for Schools, which enables schools to reflect on their progress and plan next steps against 8 key indicators of effective digital citizenship education.
Effective digital moral education requires an understanding that the information ecosystem we inhabit is not inevitable, it is the product of social, structural, and technological choices which are contingent, and of the ways it can be changed for the better through the actions and choices of young people at local, national, and global levels.