Teaching Digital Citizens: Civic Education in the Platform Society

• In Event: Civic Learning With, Within, and Against Digital Platforms

Abstract

This conceptual paper brings together recent conversations in civic education and “platform studies” (Burgess, 2021) to interrogate, and reimagine, the familiar concept of digital citizenship. From its earliest theorizations, “digital citizenship” has been understood as “the ability to participate in society online” (Mossberger et al., 2008). Scholars have delineated several strands of research that have emerged to cultivate such competencies, including those focused on (a) safety/civility (e.g., managing online presence, avoiding risky behavior); (b) information analysis (e.g., sourcing and vetting online information); and (c) civic empowerment (e.g., leveraging technologies to share perspectives on civic issues) (see Garcia et al., 2021). Such work has found considerable uptake in classrooms thanks, in part, to its promotion through professional learning workshops, curricula, and online lesson plans (Common Sense Media, ISTE, Stanford History Education Group), as well as through global intermediary organizations (UNESCO).

Generative as these resources have been, we contend that the focus of digital citizenship on online participation – be it oriented toward safety, analysis, or empowerment – presupposes a separation between “online” and “offline” sociality. We show how scholars in platform studies have challenged this bifurcation as a form of “digital dualism” (Jurgenson, 2012), a view that elides the ways online/offline activity are mutually constitutive. A person walking through their neighborhood, for instance, may not be consciously engaged in “online” activity. However, the phone in their pocket that tracks their geolocation, and their neighbor’s doorbell cameras that passively surveil them, enrolls even mundane “offline” practices into a network of “online” relations. Researchers have traced this intermingling to even wider scales, arguing that public infrastructures (e.g., education, healthcare, urban transportation, journalism) are increasingly underwritten by the logics of networked platforms – creating what some term “The Platform Society” (van Dijck et al., 2018). Developments like these, we suggest, complicate notions of ‘digital citizenship’ centered on online participation. In a platform society, there are no clear demarcations where digital citizenship ends and non-digital citizenship begins.

Rather than obviating the project of digital citizenship, our paper theorizes how this literature, in conversation with civic education scholarship (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Parker, 1996), might help us to reframe the concept. We argue that “digital citizenship” is better understood not as an identity to be attained (e.g., through the cultivation of skills or dispositions), but as a condition to be examined: we, and our students, are always already digital citizens by virtue of living in a world whose civic relations are indissolubly enmeshed with digital technologies. Taking this condition as a starting point for inquiry, we believe, offers richer possibilities for civic learning than a focus on “online participation” alone. Our paper offers a provisional framework for guiding such inquiries — exploring the interplay of platforms’ social, technical, and political-economic relations (Nichols & Garcia, 2022; van Dijck, 2013) with forms of civic identity, values, and actions (Abowitz & Harnish, 2004; Castro & Knowles, 2017). We then conclude with classroom examples that illustrate how this framework has been, and might be, put into practice with students.

Authors

• T. Philip Nichols, Baylor University

• Kevin R. Magill, Baylor University

• Alexandra Thrall, Baylor University