Digital Citizenship Curriculum: A Reflection on Perspective

 Photo Credit: www.alternative.partnership.co.uk

Reflection

Kahyne and Bowyer in their 2019 article titled "Can media literacy increase digital engagement in politics?" (click here for article) bring up a great question to reflect on, can classroom level digital engagements lead to increased political engagements? 

It really does depend on the perspective in which we are teaching digital citizenship in the classroom. Are we teaching Web 2.0 in a positive light with emphasis on the benefits or are we making social media out to be the big bad wolf of the teen age world.  

Digital Citizenship Curriculum. 

The question of perspective really does warrant a bit of research.  How are we as teachers portraying social media to our students.  For the answer, lets look at a few of the titles associated with the accepted curriculum per the State of Florida via their third party vendor. (Click here for website) 

Here are a few of the curriculum topics per the web site CommonSense.Org.

• Digital Media and your Brain
• Social Media Digital Footprints
• Sexting and Relationships
• Responding to Online Hate Speech
• Being Aware of what you Share
• Big Big Data

This is the whole list of the required 8th grade curriculum.   Keeping in mind that this curriculum comes a year after Florida students take their state required Civics class in 7th grade. So essentially our Florida students are educated and encouraged to be Civically active in their community in 7th grade but in 8th grade when they start to want to dip their toes in the pool of online civic interactions, we in no uncertain terms go to great lengths to reinforce how horrible social media can be. 

In reflection of Kahyne and Bowyer's question of increased political engagements... the answer in the State of Florida maybe be a sad... no