We live in a digital world, but behind every screen is a human. Digital technology—that of social media, online games, smartphones, and more—came into existence so fast that humans have hardly had a minute to take a breath and ask ourselves what this means for our everyday lives going forward. Now, with just a few clicks, anyone from anywhere can post anything online, and as the tech industry struggles to define its role in this digital world, it’s often up to consumers to wade through an overwhelming amount of content.

This information overload is hitting young minds at an increasingly early age. As such, many folks in the education community are seeing a growing need to add digital competency skills to school curricula.

Defining the Digital Space

Digital competency skills are often discussed using a variety of terms: digital literacy, information literacy, news or media literacy, or even digital citizenship. How we consume, find, evaluate, create, and share digital content and exist in this digital world is such a vast topic that even those who work in this area have their own terminology preferences.

Kelly Mendoza, Ph.D., is the vice president of education programs at Common Sense, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing independent advice and information to help families, educators, and students thrive in a world with media and technology. Common Sense has created a “digital citizenship” curriculum free for schools to use and implement as needed.

When asked about the variety of terms, Mendoza says, “They all fall under the umbrella of being critical consumers and creators in a digital world, with different lenses and audiences. For us, digital citizenship intersects with all of those areas, except it’s a little more about how we behave and participate in the digital world.”

Common Sense’s digital citizenship toolkit includes a social-emotional component and lesson plans on media and news literacy, as well as topics including cyberbullying, online privacy issues, and relationships and communication in the digital space. According to Mendoza, the organization’s digital citizenship work began in the late 2000s after staff began seeing parents struggle with new technology and their children’s access to it. Common Sense then partnered with Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education, which was doing research on young people’s participation in online spaces, and began to create curriculum specifically for schools.

“They were finding that young people were falling into ‘ethical fault lines’ when they participate online,” Mendoza explains. “It’s easier to bully or say things they wouldn’t say [face-to-face]. They can hide behind anonymity, and that causes a whole set of behavioral issues. There’s a whole new use of media literacy, where they’re seeing and sharing all this information without really thinking about it.

“A lot of schools have integrated this into their curriculum because they see it as a foundation for active digital learning,” Mendoza continues. “In order to have students use technology effectively, they need a foundational set of competencies.”

Kristi Starr has also taken note of the ethics behind interactions in digital spaces. A librarian, Starr is the campus technology co-lead at Coronado High School in Lubbock ISD and the 2020-21 chair of the Texas Association of School Librarians, a Texas Library Association division. Starr’s focus is largely helping her teachers and students understand how to find the right resources and the ethics behind using them (for instance, with proper attribution).

“Digital citizenship encompasses not just finding the information but also what we do with it and how we interact with it,” she explains. “That’s going to include not just searching for and locating those resources but also evaluating those resources.”

With the pandemic forcing many districts online, Starr has seen librarians up their game when it comes to assisting other educators and students with digital spaces. Her district also hosted a Digital Citizenship Week during which every student completed at least one digital learning lesson. For Starr, the heightened attention on digital citizenship is a realization that the digital space is here to stay—and students need to become active leaders, rather than passive consumers.

“We’ve got to create critical thinkers who understand not necessarily how these algorithms work, but at least acknowledge the fact that there are algorithms out there that are going to skew the content they receive.”

Critical thinking is a skillset Christina Gola says librarians constantly keep at the forefront when teaching students about digital spaces. Gola is the director of human resources and organizational development at University of Houston Libraries and is also the 2020-21 president of the Texas Library Association. Since so much of this conversation involves information and what you do with it, she prefers the term “information literacy.”

“It’s [digital content] just a different form of information, whether the information comes in text and words or if it comes in numbers and data, or if that information comes in images. It’s all conveying some kind of message that a human is internalizing through all of their experiences and background knowledge to put it into new knowledge.”

Teaching the Digital Space

A topic as wide-ranging and far-reaching as digital literacy can be taught in a variety of ways, and the State of Texas requires that each school district incorporate digital citizenship into its curriculum. Starr sees a need for digital literacy to be taught in every subject.

“I think it’s easy to think ‘I’m just a librarian, I’m just a geography teacher, I’m just an English teacher,’ and not realize our students need to be hearing these things repeatedly,” Starr says. “You know, ‘This is not appropriate. You need to be giving credit. You need to be careful about what you’re posting.’”

Gola agrees: “We [librarians] come to the table to say ‘Let’s put this into the curriculum to make sure it’s a part of each component of a discipline. It’s important for math. It’s important for science. It’s important for English and language arts. So, that’s our role—to come in and make sure that administrators and teachers are thinking about it as part of their everyday subjects in teaching.”

A school- or district-wide approach is one of the most successful ways to incorporate digital citizenship, Common Sense has found. By creating a culture of positivity around media and technology, school leadership then creates a commitment to keeping students safe and making them responsible participants online. Mendoza echoes Starr’s and Gola’s beliefs that digital literacy can be taught in every subject.

“We see all kinds of teachers teaching this topic,” Mendoza explains. “If they’re on a team in the school, they might split it up where the science teacher is more focused on media literacy because there’s a whole science angle to that, and maybe the librarian or the technology teacher is focused on privacy data, or the SEL teacher or counselor is focused on media balance. We’ve noticed the team approach is a nice way because then you’re having multiple conversations with students and it’s easier to create more of the behavior in your school around digital citizenship.”

While it could seem daunting or odd to bring up digital life in the classroom, between news articles and videos going viral, Starr thinks there are many opportune teaching moments. She uses the example of a viral TikTok dance created by one teenager. When the dance was picked up by someone with a bigger platform, that person got the attention and credit—not the originator. Examples like this can really register with middle and high schoolers because they’re often creating their own content and putting it out into the world.

“Because it was a current event, go in and talk about this with students and say, ‘Have you seen this? Have you done this?’” Starr explains. “It’s plagiarism, however you want to define it, to take someone else’s creation and begin appropriating it as your own. Whether or not you intend it to be harmful, it does have harmful consequences for the person who created it.”

Memes are another way to naturally tackle digital literacy with students. As Starr explains it, students are already creating their own memes, often from a meme generator, and educators could either create their own as part of a lesson plan or even let their students take the lead to bring about more discussion.

“Let them be experts,” Starr suggests. “There’s nothing wrong with that because it’s going to boost their self-esteem and give them an opportunity to teach. They don’t always have to be consumers. They can be producers and experts, and we can be the learners.”

Technology lessons used to require a computer lab reservation, and research used to require scheduled time in the library. Nowadays, many students already have a device and are familiar with technology—another factor that lends itself to learning opportunities, whether using intentional resources, such as the ones Common Sense provides, or taking on the subject at point of need. 

“I think sometimes we have to be very intentional and put [information literacy] into lesson plans so that it can be assessed, students can get feedback, and we can see their progress in that area,” Gola points out. “We’re in a world now where opportunities present themselves at almost every point of the day to help students learn about how to process information.”

Pre-created lesson plans are where Common Sense comes in. Common Sense has turnkey lesson plans, divided by grade level, as part of its digital citizenship curriculum. There are songs, poems, and chants featuring a cast of characters that can be used for K-5, as well as printables and writing assignments, hands-on activities, and videos for secondary grades. Much of the guidance involves scenarios and dilemmas for students to consider, with guidance and sample responses for educators to use afterward.

Mendoza emphasizes the quick activities, knowing the time constraints educators face. Many of the videos are just a few minutes, for instance, and Mendoza recommends starting small because educators will find that students are ready to talk.

“If you have 15 minutes, you can show a video and have a meaningful discussion,” Mendoza says. “Students want to talk about this with teachers. They have so much to say.”

Digital Importance & Its Future

For those whose expertise lies within digital literacy, it’s important to bring this matter into schools because otherwise, the problems that come with online spaces will persist.

For Mendoza, it goes back to “what kind of online world do we want?” For instance, we know students see real issues online—such as hate speech, bullying, and racism—and how you handle those issues online vs. face-to-face is different. Suicide in young adults can often be linked to online spaces as more students, already going through major developmental stages, make themselves vulnerable on social media. Then there’s the issue of getting “news” through social media platforms, where the content we’re reading may not be from reliable sources.

“One of the real issues right now is just misinformation and disinformation and how that can be really scary and detrimental,” Mendoza says. “Where we don’t have that common ground information to start from.

“The goal is to ultimately create a more just and better world online—a better experience. Everyone, not just young people, participates online. It’s not necessarily the platform; I think it’s the behaviors. Part of all of this is behavioral. What kind of world do we want to live in?”

And the answer may constantly evolve because what we mean when we talk about information literacy will evolve as the space itself does. Gola views digital skills as a “lifelong journey” and likes to follow a framework for information literacy created by the Association of College and Research Libraries. In this framework, researching is viewed as an inquiry, and searching for information is more about exploration rather than finding the “right” answer.

“Know that there’s always something more to learn or find or another viewpoint out there,” Gola says. “You’re seeking to expand your knowledge, not find the right answer.”

That mindset shift may be helpful in a time where any issue happening across digital spaces can quickly become politically charged or unnerving.

“When we talk about racism and white supremacy and things of that nature—that need not be a political topic; it’s a human topic,” Gola says.

The humanity behind digital spaces is a key component to remember, and Starr wants other educators to know their librarian colleagues are ready to assist in dealing with this expansive landscape.

“As a teacher-librarian, I know that digital citizenship or information literacy are terms that encompass so much, and it can seem really overwhelming,” Starr says. “But your campus librarians, your media specialists, are here to help. We want to help our students, teachers, and communities learn to navigate these waters.”

The future of our digital world will rely on the humans behind the screen.

“I would go back to that human experience—to be an individual who never stops learning, to be an individual who seeks to learn about somebody else’s viewpoints and make bridges between our differences,” Gola says. “That is why information literacy is so important. When we think about that in our current state that we’re in, where we know we’re polarized and know we have so many entrenched beliefs. How do we move ourselves forward, not just in this country, but across all of our humankind? The only way I think we can do that is for all of us to think more critically about how we’re receiving information, where we’re getting our information, the biases that come with it, and our biases when we read it. Information literacy could be the driver for bringing us together as people.”