Rethinking Digital Citizenship Education: Leveraging dilemmas to move beyond fear and toward reflective participation

Dilemmas abound in our networked lives. If someone participates in a hateful protest, is it okay to use social media to try to identify and publicly shame them? Is it fair for college admissions to consider applicants’ past social media posts from middle and high school? How should you respond if someone you trust asks you to share a racy picture? When expressing yourself online, where is the boundary between authenticity and oversharing?  Digital dilemmas are particularly acute and consequential for youth and they require new educational approaches. In this session, Carrie James and Emily Weinstein will share emerging insights from their current research on Educating with Digital Dilemmas, which includes diverse perspectives from more than 2,000 youth and over 1,000 educators. Participants will engage with dilemmas, and presenters will share a new, dispositions-oriented framework of principles and pedagogies to support youth in today’s vexed digital landscape.