Educating for a Just World: Empowering K-12 Students as Global Democratic Digital Citizens

Abstract

Given the incredible growth in online activity since the global pandemic, there is a need for an updated approach to digital citizenship education that positions students as critical designers and producers who use their learning to inform, to support, and to offer opportunities for change in their communities. In this paper, we examine some of the recent conceptualizations of digital citizenship, human rights education, and global citizenship to identify their intersections and move toward the development of a Global Democratic Digital Citizenship framework for K-12 education. We argue that current frameworks target distinct skills and competencies that enable individualistic performance of global and digital citizenship actions but neglect the development of democratic characteristics and the ways in which these are mediated by digital technologies. Students must understand how to engage respectfully with others, make their voice heard, become interculturally intelligent, and act responsibly and democratically online. Citizenship entails participation in representative democracy; therefore, citizenship education must empower youth to actively engage in local and global democratic processes through both physical and digital channels.