Citizenship in the Digital World
Mohammed Al-Idrisi's World Atlas, 1154
The differences between teaching digital citizenship and regular old ordinary citizenship are not fundamental in nature. The toolset has changed but the goal of the project has remained for over a century: to give students “. . . the knowledge, attitudes and habits of behavior which will enable . . . [them] . . . to participate effectively in social responsibilities, as well as partake of social privilege” (Garver, 1926). This expressed goal of public citizenship education was written in the 1920s, against the backdrop of tremendous social upheaval resulting from the industrial revolution. The social and technological changes students face today are no less challenging, and without premeditated guidance by their teachers many will surely be left behind. Like educators before us, the pedagogical vehicles of knowledge, attitudes and habits of behavior are the principle means of transporting students to a place of effective citizenship, digital or otherwise.
Knowledge— “Knowledge is power.” Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban
by John Vanderbank, 1731
Attitudes—“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.” Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
by Rembrandt Peale, 1800
Habits of Behavior— “Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.” Benjamin Franklin
Ben Franklin
by Joseph Siffred Duplessis (ca. 1785)
The richest and most privileged students of even a hundred years ago had access to unfathomably less information than the average American student of today. Contemporary American students have all the libraries of the world times a thousand contained within their pockets, but to “participate effectively in social responsibilities, as well as partake of social privilege,” they need more than mere access. Social studies education presents unique opportunities at modeling citizenship through the presentation of historic narrative; abstract concepts such as justice, tolerance, courage, and humility can be made concrete through a carefully constructed curriculum. The development of an attitude of citizenship can also be facilitated through student-centered group activities, but new technologies can take this learning objective to new worlds . . . or rather, to the other side of this world:
Imagine a unit in an American history class where students explore issues surrounding the Second World War. Through reading, class discussions, and collaborative group activities they would each develop political, economic, and socio-cultural perspectives. Now imagine the teacher of this class has a collaborative relationship with an English-speaking Japanese social studies teacher (maybe they met on Twitter). Both classes, the American history class and the Japanese history class, could be coordinated to arrive at WWII at about the same time in the curriculum.
The American students would by this time have been presented with a narrative of the forcing open of Japan to trade in the 19th century and the ensuing Meiji Restoration; they would have learned about Japan’s race to be competitive on the imperial world stage with Europe and the United States, and they would have studied the horrors of Unit 731 and the Rape of Nanking. By the time the curriculum got around to discussing Truman’s fateful decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they would likely have developed strong feelings about these hitherto abstract issues.
Each American student, or small group of students, could then be paired off with a counterpart from the Japanese class, and the groups could collaborate on projects together via Skype or some other platform. Maybe they could collaborate on the construction of a website exploring the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or perhaps they could create a report on the rehabilitation of Japan after the war; whatever the topic, the process would require maturity and diplomacy from all concerned, and would embody everything important about digital citizenship.
The assignment would also be an opportunity to practice cultural diversity awareness while students were made aware of cultural differences in communication strategies. Beyond the nuts and bolts of using technology responsibly and engaging with an international community of learners, such an assignment could open up depth of scholarship well-beyond the syllabi of yesterday.
Abowitz, K., & Jason Harnish. (2006). Contemporary Discourses of
Citizenship. Review of Educational Research, 76(4), 653-690.
“Citizenship, at least theoretically, confers membership, identity, values, and rights of participation and assumes a body of common political knowledge.”
Garver, F. (1926). Training for Citizenship in the Schools. The Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science,125, 180-187. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1015910
Ribble, Mike. Digital Citizenship in Schools. 2nd ed. 2011.