Our paper “Young people and digital literacy learning: co-producing critical citizenship practices” has been published and is available in open access here:  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14681366.2025.2593611

We hope the discussions we foster in this publication resonate with educators, youth workers, policymakers and anyone committed to education that aims to be both meaningful and empowering.

At the core of this paper is a proposal of a pedagogy of empowerment, an educational practice  drawn from a ‘problem posing’ approach which aims to encourage young people as active citizens not just to absorb information, but to question, reimagine, and redefine dominant forms of knowledge.

This research direction stems from the realisation that young people’s digital safety is often approached via top-down, risk-avoidance strategies. While these are understandable given concerns about digital harms, they have a downside: they can inhibit young people’s development of critical digital literacies and limit their freedom.

Instead, via the work reported in this paper, we set out to promote a model of critical digital engagement grounded in dialogical and reasoning practices, where young people are treated as ethical, deliberative digital beings, rather than passive risk-averse subjects.

This approach, drawing from Freire’s proposal of cultural circles and Habermas’ work on informed publics, resulted in the development of three pillars of digital engagement to guide the development of critical learning activities:

1. Digital reasoning: the ability to form opinions and make informed decisions based on online information and interactions.
2. Digital being: the understanding of oneself and others in the context of digital interactions; and
3. Digital integrity: the ability to adapt culturally and ethically to the challenges of the digital environment.

Key takeaways:

The paper offers a concrete, research-based alternative to the digital risk and safety approach to young people’s safeguarding. It provides an approach to digital literacy curriculum that relies on methods of co-production and positions young people as active agents, capable of ethical and critical engagement online. Such an approach aims to foster empowered, ethical, and autonomous digital citizens.

The research shows the importance of digital cultural guides, university students whose digital experiences more closely resemble those of young people than those of their teachers, in fostering critical awareness.

The paper contributes to curriculum imagination by proposing key principles for the design of critical digital literacy teaching and learning:

• Reasoning and deliberation: Creating spaces for discursive experiences rather than offering prescriptive information.
• Ethics: Centring students as ethical beings capable of reflecting on and appreciating a moral framework for digital practice.
• Creative freedom: Allowing students to express their learning through personal and imaginative means.
• Meaningful connections: Fostering learning relationships that enhance learning experiences via engagement with cultural guides as meaningful others.

If you would like to explore these ideas further or collaborate on future projects, please do get in touch: https://digitalliteraciesnetwork.com/contact/

Further readings about this work:

Costa, C., & Michaela, O. (2023). The Durham Digital Literacy Project (19). https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1739651