As a media literacy educator, I believe that digital citizenship is a critical teaching and learning priority in the 21st century. Empowering students to be responsible, purposeful, and active digital citizens is fundamental to my practice. While most digital citizenship advocates will acknowledge media literacy as a fundamental skill, for me, media literacy is digital citizenship—I just don’t see any discernible difference between the goals of media literacy and those of digital citizenship. After all, the Internet is the dominant media technology of the 21st century, thus, a holistic approach to media literacy should encompass the skills one needs to navigate online environments, participate online, and engage critically with online media.
In my practice related to digital citizenship, I am particularly interested in empowering students to:
- Understand how the Internet is organized and maintained
- Be able to navigate the Internet safely and effectively
- Actively participate with online media and in online spaces
- Manage their digital footprints responsibly and purposefully
- Understand and make use of their Fair Use rights
- Develop healthy digital relationships and habits
- Understand how algorithms work and how data is commodified
- Be aware and critical of targeted advertising
- Be able to identify misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda
- Make use of the Internet to further their interests, goals, and civic participation
While the above goals represent the learning outcomes of a digital citizenship curriculum, they also represent essential media literacy skills. I believe all students should have access to media literacy learning, that all K-12 schools should provide that learning, and that digital citizenship is a good framework from which that learning could be approached. The above list of learning outcomes also naturally connect to other kinds of media literacy that are vital to 21st century learning, including advertising literacy, news literacy, medium literacy, and information literacy.
So, I would argue that a) digital citizenship should be a critical component of K-12 curricula; b) media literacy should also be a critical component of K-12 curricula; and c) that digital citizenship learning is a fine way to deliver media literacy learning, and vice versa.