Digital Citizenship Education – Interdisciplinary Citizenship Education for the Digital Age

Digitization poses new possibilities and challenges for citizens, both young and old. The digital age, which blurs boundaries between the online world and the offline world due to the rapid development of information and communication technologies, has prompted an extension of the conceptual scope of citizenship (Kim and Choi 2018). This new framework for citizenship – digital citizenship – poses a number of challenges for civic education. First, it leads to the necessity to define the differences between traditional concepts of citizenship and digital citizenship, which includes the areas in which the dominant role of the internet influences not only the structure of our society, but also the framework of citizenship and the acts of citizens. Second, it also highlights the need to define competences for digital citizenship and the role of civic education in their facilitation. In the current discourse, different definitions of digital citizenship and digital citizenship education can be identified. They can be divided into narrower approaches on the one hand, focusing on the responsible use of digital technologies, and broader approaches on the other hand, based on multidimensional concepts which include technical skills as well as critical perspectives and networking agency (Choi et al. 2018; Kenner and Lange 2019). Especially broader approaches of digital citizenship and digital citizenship education offer possible links for interdisciplinary approaches to education in the digital age. Discourses in other disciplines, focusing on digital literacy, algorithmic literacy or coding literacy, often view the issue of digitization and the requirements for the educational contexts that come with it form a different perspective (Bakke 2020; Burke et al. 2016; Czernoch and Biro 2015; Koltay 2011). Although such a technical perspective on important competences for digital citizens may not be the focus of civic education, the topics connected to them are still part of its domain. In order to prevent a fragmentation of education for the digital society, it is necessary to identify possibilities for interdisciplinary connections. The goal of this paper is hence to discuss frameworks of digital citizenship and propose requirements for digital citizenship education, especially regarding necessary competences for mature digital citizens. Furthermore, the possibility of interdisciplinary approaches and their necessity for digital citizenship education will be discussed.