For those of you who know me, you know that I am working on finishing my Masters at UOIT, looking at the impact of a contextual approach (OnEdSschat) on student digital citizenship, leadership, and digital literacy. It was really hard to concentrate today. I sat at my computer and poured over research papers about digital citizenship approaches. I looked at dozens of definitions. What many of them had in common was the idea that digital citizenship, like citizenship is about civic engagement.
Jones and Mitchell (2016) in their study of 978 youth define digital citizenship as 1) respectful and tolerant behaviours toward others and 2) increased civic engagement activities (page 2065). “While traditional citizenship studies have focused on public participation in the political process (Westheimer and Kahne, 2004a, 2004b), conceptualizations of citizenship are becoming more inclusive of a range of civic behaviours such as participating in community activities, working to improve community or societal problems, and addressing social injustices (Levine, 2007; Sherrod et al., 2002; Thorson, 2012; Westheimer and Kahne, 2004b; Zukin et al., 2006) (in Jones and Mitchell, 2016, page 2065) ISTE (2017) refers to the New Digital Citizenship as digital agents: to leverage technology for social change.
And of course in Social LEADia, students who demonstrate digital leadership empower others and support causes that are important to them.
I couldn’t concentrate, because students from various councils in Ontario had organized a walk which was supposed to happen at 1:15 pm ET. I couldn’t help but look at the Instagram account which they had created weeks ago (interestingly it had only about 250 followers when I first joined and today it has 18.3K followers), their website which includes a walkout guide (in English and French), a school registration spreadsheet of all of the schools in Ontario and their student walk out accounts as well as a link to their petition. Take a look at this video they created too:
RETWEET THIS IF YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR EDUCATION #STUDENTSSAYNO pic.twitter.com/iSUL68htcJ
— KELLY (@adamkellogs) April 1, 2019
And so at 1:10, I took my new pup out for a walk to see how many kids would participate and what would happen. There was a police car there, but the walk out was peaceful.
Some people have suggested that this protest was orchestrated by adults; and while I believe there may have been adult mentors in the background, I know enough about student leadership to know that students are capable of such an organized and successful walk out. In my own family, our daughter asked if she should walk out. When we asked her why she might and what the walk out was for (we knew but wanted to make sure she did), it was interesting to see her think through the issue and the pros and cons.
Whatever your political views, these kids leveraged social media to try to impact change. I think it is not only commendable, but a testament to the fact that kids are capable of much more than that for which we give them credit.
Check it out at #sudentssayno on Twitter and Instagram and check out the Twitter moment I created:
Jones, L. M., & Mitchell, K. J. (2016). Defining and measuring youth digital citizenship. New Media & Society, 18(9), 2063-2079.