Teaching digital citizens in today's world

Resource Summary

Nearly a decade ago, Common Sense Education began a collaboration with researchers at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This collaboration supported the developmentof Common Sense Education's first curriculum, at that time called the Digital Literacy and Citizenship Curriculum, launched in 2010. The curriculum built on key insights from Project Zero's research on how young people engaged with moral and ethical issues in digital life. This was the first comprehensive digital citizenship curriculum, and at the time "digital citizenship" was not awell-known term.

Fast-forward to today, and Common Sense Education has over 600,000 educator membersregistered and reaches more than 60,000 schools in the United States. While the free curriculum1has been highly successful on many counts, the ever-changing digital landscape brings forth newissues for schools. Educators are understandably concerned about today's challenges and digital dilemmas, which necessitate updates to the curriculum.

Since the initial collaboration with Common Sense Education, the Project Zero (PZ) team has continued to study kids' and teens' digital lives. A collection of PZ projects—led at various times by Howard Gardner, Katie Davis, Carrie James, and Emily Weinstein—have focused on the ways apps and digital tools intersect with young people's social and emotional well-being; imagination and creativity; intimacy and close relationships; moral and ethical responsibilities; and civic agency. And Common Sense Education has continued to develop new resources, tools, and supports to guide schools and families.

In 2017, our paths reconverged, just as Common Sense Education began a refresh of the curriculum and as PZ researchers embarked on a new wave of research. We renewed our collaboration with a commitment to providing timely, relevant, research-backed resources toschools to help students navigate often times thorny situations in digital life. Led by Carrie James and Emily Weinstein at PZ, the current research project, Educating with Digital Dilemmas (EDD),explores the personal, moral, ethical, and civic dilemmas of today's networked world, how tweens and teens are navigating such dilemmas, and the roles adults are playing—and should play—in supporting young people. (See study details in Appendix A.) As part of this initiative, PZ is conducting surveys of educators, parents, and young people (age 10 to 18) about key topics of concern, perspectives on digital dilemmas, and the types of conversations about networked life that are both present in and absent from schools and homes. In addition to surveying key stakeholders, the research includes in-depth interviews with educators who are using innovative pedagogies to explore these complex topics with their students.

This report points to a collection of core insights about young people and digital life from theemerging EDD research and also includes insights from academic research on media and children, focusing particularly on challenges that U.S. tweens and teens face in their digital lives. This research lays the foundation for Common Sense Education's updated Digital Citizenship Curriculum. We describe the curriculum's unique approach, grounded in Project Zero's research, which focuses on pedagogical strategies that support both student skills and dispositions. The following sections outline the six key topics covered in the curriculum and address the importanceof a whole-community approach among educators, students, and parents in creating a thriving culture of digital citizenship.

Read the full report.