by Carrie James and Emily Weinstein
For over a decade, we (Carrie and Emily) have been careful observers of young people’s experiences as they grow up in an age of radical connectivity. Our studies have spanned the ways digital life intersects with adolescents’ mental health and well-being, close relationships, civic development, and moral and ethical decision-making, among other topics.
Our latest round of research has focused on digital dilemmas. We study dilemmas by digging into young people’s perspectives with a multi-generational research team that spans teens to Gen Xers. A regular part of our research team meetings involves squirming in our seats as we puzzle over dilemmas that demand consideration yet evade easy answers. If someone participates in a hateful protest, is it fair game to use social media to expose personal information that might in turn compromise their physical safety or employment? Is it okay to share violent videos online to call attention to what is happening in the world, even if the content is triggering to some viewers? When is it reasonable to expose and exploit people’s past posts and private messages? These dilemmas are timely, relevant, and vexed.
For middle and high schoolers, social media use is now a routine aspect of everyday life. Interspersed with social updates and casual sharing, youth encounter more weighty civic posts and decision points about what to share, re-post, like, and screenshot, as well as what to follow, unfollow, mute, and avoid. Good citizenship in a connected world requires that young people have both knowledge and thinking dispositions to grapple with digital dilemmas.
Although digital citizenship has been on schools’ agendas for some time, it often takes the form of cautionary tales and a list of “Don’ts” Don’t cyberbully. Don’t believe everything you read. Don’t post anything that could get you in trouble, kicked out of school, or denied a job opportunity.
Supporting young people in a networked era requires approaches that meet the complexity of our times. In our work—using pedagogies that confront (rather than skirt) the complexity—we advocate educating with and for digital dilemmas. Over the last few years, we’ve worked in partnership with our colleagues at Common Sense Education, a leader in providing digital citizenship curricula (link here) and related supports to educators and schools.
With Common Sense, we’ve developed and field-tested a variety of resources and approaches that advocate using digital dilemmas as jumping off points for thoughtful classroom discussions. We’re especially excited about our new Digital Dilemmas and Thinking Routines resources (link here).
Dilemma scenarios have long been used as signature tools in moral education. Readers of this blog are likely familiar, too, with The Good Project’s longstanding emphasis on powerful, thorny dilemmas. When our team started using digital dilemmas in the classroom, we found that they immediately sparked engagement and interest, in no small part because they are provocative and often directly relevant to students’ lives.
But we also saw how youth (and even adults) can get stuck in their knee-jerk reactions. We wanted to help students look beyond their initial reactions; to support more nuanced consideration of their own views and more intentional dialogue with others’. This is all the more important because digital life can itself trap us in echo chambers where we only engage with perspectives that reinforce our own views. Good citizenship certainly requires broader consideration, and classroom discussions are an apt context for discussing dilemmas (link here) with others and debating pros and cons (link here) of different paths forward.
Good thinking is foundational to digital citizenship—and to citizenship more broadly. We aim to help students develop dispositions that guide reflective, responsible, and ethical use of technology. These essential dispositions for digital life include slowing down to recognize dilemmas as they arise; reflecting on responsibilities to self, close relations, and wider communities; exploring perspectives (especially those that differ from one’s own); seeking facts and evidence to make informed decisions; and building agency through envisioning options and impacts, and taking actions that are both self-protective and socially responsible.
How do we get there? In classroom practice, thinking routines (link here) are a powerful pedagogy to support dispositions (Ritchhart et al., 2011; Tishman et al., 1993), Taking direct inspiration from our Project Zero colleagues’ long standing work on thinking routines and dispositions, we created a routine called Take A Stand. Take a Stand is designed to support dispositions to slow down and reflect, and to discover one’s own perspective or stance while also exploring perspectives of others.
Take A Stand: The protocol
In collaboration with teachers as well as our colleagues at Common Sense Education, we designed a classroom protocol called Take A Stand, which is designed to be used alongside dilemma scenarios. This four-step protocol gets students in the habit of considering and reconsidering their own and others' perspectives. It especially directs consideration to tensions between responsibilities to individuals and responsibilities to the wider world and civic life.
Here’s an overview of the protocol: Take A Stand
What does Take A Stand look like in the classroom?
Kelly Erceg’s eighth grade classroom is situated in a public middle school the Los Angeles area. When she used the Take A Stand protocol, she paired it with a dilemma that enabled a powerful discussion about the ethics of streaming fights online.
The topic was highly relevant on a number of levels. A recent public incident at nearby Disneyland had led to viral videos of a violent brawl that erupted between two members of the same family. The videos had received widespread attention/clicks and gave police evidence to file criminal charges that ultimately led to jail time for one of the aggressors. The fight was local news for Kelly’s students; they all seemed to know about it. This incident and concerns about a larger “record everything” culture sparked her interest in bringing the issue into her classroom. The school district’s recent launch of a 1:1 iPad policy, which gave students ongoing access to their own recording devices throughout the school day, was another motivator.
“Streaming Fights” (link here) is a fictionalized dilemma scenario about students recording and streaming a fight between classmates. Pairing the dilemma with the Take a Stand routine invited students to share their own perspectives on the ethics of recording/posting violent incidents online and provided a structure to support listening to different views. As the conversation unfolded, students asserted stances across the spectrum from approval to disapproval and gave voice to different considerations. They wondered about instances when recording violence is for entertainment or for increasing one’s own views and popularity on social media versus instances when recording is carried out as an effort “to serve justice.” Whether and when to use mobile devices for recording purposes—a thorny dilemma—became an accessible topic for rich, purposeful classroom learning.
Here are a few examples of student takeaways we’ve collected related to Take A Stand:
“You have to be aware of the implications of your actions, not just from where it takes you but where it takes other people”
“You need to look from multiple perspectives and make sure you know every outcome”
“One thing I took away from today's activity was that if something big and negative is happening nearby, and [if] we have the power to try to stop it, we should, instead of posting it on social media.”
“We have to take in consideration of others and posting may ruin their reputation.”
“Once we take out our phones and start filming the problem we've automatically become part of it”
Digital dilemmas can offer an opportunity for talking with students about hard situations before they arise in students’ own lives. When we pair them with thinking routines like Take a Stand, we can build students’ sense of agency by supporting dispositions to envision options and possible impacts so they can make informed decisions in their real, radically connected lives.
To read more about our disposition-centered approach to digital citizenship education, read our new report (link here).
Interested in using this routine to bring digital civic dilemmas into your classroom? See our Take A Stand Educator Guide (link here) and Student Handout (link here). Pair it with the Protest Dilemma (link here) or another dilemma in our Digital Dilemmas compilation (link here). Or, create your own dilemma that feels relevant to your context and students right now.
Carrie James is a Research Associate and Principal Investigator at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research explores young people’s digital, civic, and moral lives.
Emily Weinstein is a Senior Researcher at Project Zero. For the last decade, her work has focused how today’s technologies shape teens’ lives and development.
Carrie and Emily currently co-direct the Digital Dilemmas (link here) and Reimagining Digital Well-being (link here) initiatives at Project Zero, which have been supported by Susan Crown Exchange, Germanacos Foundation, and funders of Common Sense Education. Weinstein and James are co-authors of the forthcoming book, Behind Their Screens: What Teens are Facing (and Adults are Missing) (The MIT Press).
References
Ritchhart, R., Church, M., & Morrison, K. (2011). Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners. Jossey-Bass.
Tishman, S., Jay, E., & Perkins, D. N. (1993). Teaching Thinking Dispositions: From Transmission to Enculturation. Theory Into Practice, 32(3), 147–153.