Teaching for Digital Citizenship: Digital ethics in the classroom and beyond it.

Digital citizenship and data ethics prepare young people to create, navigate and exercise agency in the world of work, civic and social life into the future; however, there is considerable ambiguity in the ways these concepts are currently understood and enacted in schools. The curriculum does not furnish a definitive definition of digital citizenship, and many approaches to digital skills or digital safeguarding proceed without attention to developing students' moral and civic agency. Understanding the different aims, challenges and practices of teaching for digital citizenship in secondary schools, both across curriculum areas such as Citizenship, PSHE, Religion Values & Ethics, Modern Studies and Computer Science, and in the wider life of the school through digital home-school communication, safeguarding against online abuse and cyber-bullying, the use of mobile devices and access to pupil data, will enable us to develop strategies, resources and practices which refurbish a workable and coherent moral education for the challenges of digital citizenship and data ethics.
To understand these different aims, challenges and practices, this project will bring together previously unconnected stakeholders in the philosophy of digital ethics, developers of digital tools for teachers, curriculum policymakers and the teachers themselves to map the extent to which beginning teachers, teacher educators and school leaders are aware of these challenges, and their approaches to addressing them. It is also important to understand the enactment of these approaches across the curriculum and wider life of the school, which is why this project will undertake four case studies across the nations of the UK, working in each case with a regional cluster of 3 schools all drawing on a shared digital citizenship resource. The purpose of these ethnographic engagements is to understand the coherence of the curriculum, the extent to which Computer Science addresses ethical challenges, the extent to which practices beyond the curriculum are responsive to digital ethics, and the awareness shown by teachers of the ethical dimension of their digital pedagogical practices. In order to refurbish a workable and coherent moral education for the challenges of digital citizenship and data ethics, we will work collaboratively with secondary students and teachers as co-researchers through a digital participatory research design, generating, piloting and evaluating resources to address the ethical issues and practical challenges identified by our professional conversations and ethnographic observations.
This project employs ethnographic, normative and participatory approaches to understand the ways digital citizenship and data ethics challenges are understood and responses taken up across the curriculum and the wider life of the school. We conceive of digital citizenship at three levels: at the level of the school, what does it mean to be a good citizen of one's school community; at the level of the civic, what are schools doing to prepare the future political and economic citizens of the nation; and in relation to the increasingly complex globalized digital economy. We will carry out multi-site ethnographic work in schools in order to understand the influence of teacher preparation, national education policy, and the influence of digital resources produced by mid-level policy enactors, on the ways schools enact their digital citizenship curriculum. We will create and curate communities of practice, making use of smartphone-enabled remote working to bring together developers, teachers, students and philosophers in order to design, pilot and disseminate freely available resources for use in secondary schools. The resulting resources, together with a report making recommendations for teacher educators, school leaders, examination authorities and policy-makers across the four nations of the UK, will furnish an integrated cross-curricular digital citizenship strategy.