From Digital Citizenship to Critical Digital Citizenship
We are sending a short mid-week blog post to share a new page on critical digital citizenship. Digital citizenships is often taught in schools, but popular digital citizenship curriculum often has tenuous ties to citizenship. For instance, look at the Common Sense Media’s digital citizenship topics: digital footprint, media balance, cyberbullying, online privacy, communication, and news & media literacy. How many of these topics will help students address the most serious problems facing our communities and democracy? Will they address surveillance, racism, misinformation, or transphobia online? Unfortunately, digital citizenship curriuculum is often closer connected to personal reputation. While worth teaching students, why are we calling that citizenship?
Instead of providing answers, we turn to youth who are addressing the serious problems of our multiracial democracy. The Young People's Race, Power, and Technology (YPRPT) project is an out-of-school initiative that uses a research-based curriculum to empower high school-aged youth, mostly from historically marginalized groups, to explore, critique, and reimagine technology. The program integrates technology “under the hood” investigations with social justice topics, documentary filmmaking, and relationship building among participants. Teams from local high schools, community-based organizations, and faith-based groups partner with Chicagoland activists and artists plus faculty and students from Northwestern University's TREE Lab to complete a 19-week curriculum and produce a short documentary film about a technology-related issue of the youth's choosing.
Watch two youth-produced documentaries and consider the following questions: What do you see, think, and wonder about the youth’s learning? How are youth enacting digital citizenship in these videos?
You can read more on our Critical Digital Citizenship page. This page emerged from a presentation created for the 2022 American Educational Research Association (AERA) by Charles W. Logan (@charleswlogan), Dr. Amy L. Chapman (@Chapmaab), Dr. Daniel G. Krutka (@dankrutka), and Dr. Swati Mehta (@swati1201) with influence from the YPRPT work of Dr. Sepehr Vakil (@sepehrvakil). You can join us at the Marriot Marquis North Tower, Pacific Ballroom 26 on Thursday (04/21/22) from 11:30am-1pm PST. You can read the short AERA paper titled, “In that system, we all look like thieves”: Developing Young People’s Critical Digital Citizenship or view the presentation slides here.
Want to meet up with us at #AERA22 in San Diego? We're meeting up on Friday, April 22nd at 4pm PST at Lou & Mickey’s (224 Fifth Ave 92101), just across the train tracks from Hall F at the San Diego Convention Center. We accept RSVPs via any medium—whether responding to this tweet, DMing us, email, or our contact page.