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Tittelen på seminaret er: Teachers of Social Studies – Teacher Educators’ Views of Digital Citizenship and Professional Digital Competence
The postdigital pervasion of digital technologies in society changes how citizens interact, which places new demands on young people’s digital citizenship. Fake news, digital surveillance, and artificial intelligence are examples of young citizens’ need to develop digital competence to engage with digital technologies. At national and supranational levels in Europe, challenges related to digital citizenship have been addressed through educational efforts.
In Sweden, the empirical context of this PhD project, the government has assigned teacher education with a key role to provide new teachers with relevant knowledge and competences. Teacher educators thus need to provide student teachers with opportunities to develop professional digital competence (PDC) to include questions relating to digital citizenship in their teaching.
Against this background, this PhD project explores how teacher education prepares subject student teachers to teach for digital citizenship.
This paper, the second study of the PhD project, explores how teacher educators view the role of social studies teacher education in engaging with content relating to digital citizenship and the conditions to teach for digital citizenship. In Sweden, social studies has a long history of addressing citizenship, and aspects of digital citizenship have been increasingly articulated in the national curriculum. Focusing on five teacher education institutions, a reflexive thematic analysis of course plans, study guides, and semi-structured interviews with 15 teacher educators shows that the role of social studies in addressing digital citizenship is important but that there are several challenges.
Examples include teacher educators’ PDC to teach teaching for digital citizenship, inadequate policy support, and local program organization given the multidisciplinary nature of social studies which lacks an academic counterpart. Implications are also discussed in light of the first PhD project study, which focuses on a module on education and democracy mandatory for all student teachers regardless of subject specialization (presented at TEPEC in 2021).
Additional reading:
Örtegren, A. (2022). Digital Citizenship and Professional Digital Competence – Swedish Subject Teacher Education in a Postdigital Era. Postdigital Science and Education, 4(2), 467-493. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00291-7.