Last spring, we asked a cohort of 8th grade students if we should ban TikTok.
This question was part of an ongoing study that aims to design digital-citizenship curriculum that better prepares students to grapple with the complex interplay between digital technologies and our civic lives. For two years, our team of practicing teachers from one school in Texas and researchers at Baylor University has been designing digital-citizenship units built on this premise. To understand how students interact with our curriculum, we have been implementing our units in social studies and English/language arts classes with the same cohort of 85 students as they move through their secondary school experience.
The debate over banning TikTok gave us one entry point into this complex digital-civic interplay. Through this topic, we discussed issues as broad as Chinese-American political relations, corporate governance, data security, children’s online safety, and free speech. Some students shared their extensive technical knowledge about digital platforms, while others learned new perspectives. Some formed adamant opinions, while others reflected that their thinking changed throughout these conversations.
Unbeknownst to us, one year later, these students would get to watch actual legislation to ban Tik Tok become law. This legislation and its ensuing public debate demonstrate how the issues of digital citizenship have moved far beyond good online behavior to encompass issues of global scale and relevance. While the rights, privacy, and futures of American students are at stake, their digital-citizenship education falls woefully short of preparing them to understand, engage in, and shape debates about digital policy.
Most widely used resources for digital-citizenship education focus on students’ individual digital practices, like sourcing, privacy protection, and cyberbullying prevention. From our experience teaching and researching digital-citizenship curriculum, we argue that this approach fails to engage students in meaningful learning about the complexity imbued in both of digital citizenship’s component terms: the “digital” and the “citizenship.”
In attending to the “digital,” for instance, digital-citizenship education often focuses narrowly on the content and user features of digital platforms, asking students to question whether the information they see is trustworthy, what information they should share, and how to best interact with/through this technology. These questions fail to address platforms’ interlocking social, technical, and political-economic dynamics. Where typical advice for navigating the internet tends to fixate on platforms’ social dimensions (i.e., their immediate uses and impacts), our public policy debates—like that of the TikTok ban—spotlight the significance of platforms’ technical and political-economic layers. Making space for inquiry into these dimensions in classrooms can help foster rich discussion about technical algorithms and data processes that underwrite platform technologies and the political-economic structures in which they are embedded, such as platform ownership, trade, and regulation.
Educators must include these technical and political-economic dimensions to help students understand the breadth of digital influences in our civic lives. Classroom inquiries should start with broader questions like:
- What do digital platforms do with our data?
- What biases are embedded in digital platforms’ algorithms and datasets? How do we know?
- How do platforms’ technical designs shape our social relations—from the immediate to the global?
In attending to “citizenship,” digital-citizenship education traditionally centers the individual and their consumer practices or what civics education researchers Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne have called “personally responsible citizenship.” Students are asked to consider what apps to use and how to responsibly use them. But this definition of citizenship ignores important concerns highlighted in our policy debates. For instance, the TikTok ban debate shows how the reach of platforms requires thinking and action about the public as a whole, not just individual choices. Educators must push students to consider a collective notion of citizenship to prepare them to confront these collective challenges. Classroom inquiries should start with broader questions like:
- What actions can we take to hold multinational corporations accountable?
- How can we imagine technologies that promote our civic ideals?
- What is/should be the role of the government in managing our digital technologies?
These questions could apply to any number of emerging digital policy debates. Just over the summer, disputes arose over topics ranging from requiring a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms to whether cellphones should be banned from schools. In each of these discussions and many others, we see the potential to draw students into significant deliberations that could shape how we manage our digital civic lives into the future.
It’s past time to encourage students to begin tackling these questions in the K-12 curriculum. As digital technologies increasingly alter facets of our civic lives, the stakes are too high to continue limiting students’ learning to concerns of personal use and responsibility. And, based on our study, we know they’re ready.
During our discussions, the 8th graders welcomed the opportunity to break down many adults’ assumptions that students are TikTok-addicted digital natives and eagerly dissected both sides of the argument. They assessed issues ranging from TikTok’s addictiveness to broader questions of corporate ownership and control.
As one student put it, digital-citizenship education should amount to more than lectures on responsible online behavior. Students shouldn’t feel left out of the complex “digital” and “citizenship” concerns being publicly deliberated.
Educators and policymakers must find ways to engage students in critical questions about digital citizenship that are already shaping the world around us. Giving students an opportunity to inquire into the intricacies and interrelatedness of digital and civic life in ways that mirror the complexity of our current policy debates is a starting point.
