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Educationalists’, researchers’, and policy makers’ work on children’s digital resilience has marginalised the role of the broader context within which digital resilience is constituted, experienced and derived. We aimed to address this lacuna by exploring how pre-teen’s digital resilience operates as a dynamic socio-ecological process. Addressing this aim, we employed participatory methods and thematically analysed eight focus groups with children aged 8–12 years (n = 59) and 20 telephone interviews with parents/carers and teachers of 8–12-year-olds and internet safety experts to examine this issue. We used purposive sampling and collected data over three months (January-March 2020). Our analysis constructed a matrix of main themes, constituent, and cross-cutting sub-themes. By placing this within a socio-ecological framework, we illustrate how pre-teens’ digital resilience operates within and across differing four levels (individual, home, community and societal) and four domains (learning, recognising, managing, and recovery). The paper advances the literature by illustrating how children can be supported to build and show digital resilience within and across different levels and domains. It is argued that digital resilience should be re-conceptualised as a collective endeavour involving children at an individual level, parents/carers within home environments, youth workers, civil society, teachers, and schools at a community level, along with governments, policymakers, and the education system and internet corporations at a societal level. We conclude by providing practice and research recommendations guiding those supporting children to facilitate opportunities to thrive online.

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This article proposes a theoretical framework for how critical digital literacy, conceptualized as incorporating Internet users’ utopian/dystopian imaginaries of society in the digital age, facilitates civic engagement. To do so, after reviewing media literacy research, it draws on utopian studies and political theory to frame utopian thinking as relying dialectically on utopianism and dystopianism. Conceptualizing critical digital literacy as incorporating utopianism/dystopianism prescribes that constructing and deploying an understanding of the Internet’s civic potentials and limitations is crucial to pursuing civic opportunities. The framework proposed, which has implications for media literacy research and practice, allows us to (1) disentangle users’ imaginaries of civic life from their imaginaries of the Internet, (2) resist the collapse of critical digital literacy into civic engagement that is understood as inherently progressive, and (3) problematize polarizing conclusions about users’ interpretations of the Internet as either crucial or detrimental to their online engagement.

This article draws on moral theory to advance digital citizenship education and explore how adolescents aged 13–16 make decisions when confronted with incivility, such as cyberbullying, on social media. Given the extent to which digital citizenship education may be approached in line with deontological (rules), utilitarian (consequences) and/or virtue ethical (character) theories, we argue that it is important to know which of these underpin adolescents’ moral decision making online. To address this question, this article reports findings from a survey completed by 1947 13–16 year olds in England. Chi-square tests, binary logistic regressions and other exploratory analysis showed that most 13–16 year-olds use virtue ethical reasons to justify moral actions. We conclude that if online incivility is to be reduced, policymakers, educators and parents should focus more on virtue- and character-based approaches to digital citizenship education.