Digital Citizenship Is Central to the Liberal Arts Mission

In an earlier article on the Every Learner website, I argued that college and university faculty have a responsibility to support student development in the context of digital environments. Those environments may be familiar and commonplace, like social media platforms and a learning management system, or emerging, like AI-enabled tools. I outlined ways educators can help students develop a combination of digital fluency, digital identity, and digital citizenship to learn in, navigate, and positively contribute to these environments.

Here I want to expand on a point I made in that earlier article — that understanding and teaching digital citizenship is mission critical to a liberal arts institution. If we believe college is a place for students to discover how they will make their contributions to society, then digital citizenship is not an enrichment activity. It is a primary area where a liberal arts education is enacted.

A liberal arts education is transformative

I assume most readers will generally agree that a liberal arts education is one focused on the development of a whole person. It develops a student’s ability to think critically, discover their own motivation for learning, find their distinct personal voice, cultivate their creativity, and empathize with others. And it does that out of a concern with how students will function in their environment and participate as citizens in a democracy.

To that end, faculty use the teaching of broad conceptual frameworks, specific content, and narrow competencies to prompt fundamental questions like:

• How do we know what’s true?
• Where does authority come from?
• How do we evaluate sources?
• How is knowledge created?
• How is that knowledge used to change the world?

Ultimately, activities that raise these questions change a person. One of the most powerful things a student can say is “I never thought of it that way before.” Another powerful moment is when they begin thinking about what they have to say to the world more than about what their grade will be.

In that sense, a liberal arts education is transformative. It changes students individually and enables them to become citizens who transform their environments. It shapes and empowers them to critically and empathetically engage with the world and build community.

Where the transformation happens

Increasingly, the environments and communities that require a critical stance and transformation are digitally mediated or wholly online. For better or worse, students are digital citizens right now. They are experiencing and contributing to the world through tools and spaces that include university LMS’ and courseware, text threads with friends and family, their own websites, social media accounts, online news sites, plain old email, and in the comment function of word processing programs.

Sometimes students are passive consumers in these spaces, feeding their data and time into the machine. Sometimes they are active participants, thoughtfully contributing their ideas and perspectives and influencing the tone and experience that others have. They are developing their own voices and amplifying other voices, and they are encountering trolls, rabbit holes, and echo chambers. Hopefully, they are consciously building their personal knowledge networks and finding communities that lift them up.

In any case, our students will be responsible in the future for developing the next generation of digital tools or implementing digital experiences in their communities. Imagine them in a leadership position a few years from now and deciding how technologies for creating and communicating will be used in their workplace. What values do we hope they will have in that moment?

Some faculty prefer to think of these digital environments as trivial or inauthentic and try to draw boundaries to isolate them from academic work. This is unrealistic and irresponsible. In the last fifteen years, we learned students will use phones and social media and create their own webpages with or without us, and we are already learning these lessons again with respect to AI. Students are not just using AI tools, they are creating them.

Trying to separate the digital world from academic work is also a missed opportunity to meet students where they are, make learning more relevant, and put the power of those tools into their hands. Faculty have always worked with students to learn to argue productively, to say ‘I don’t know,’ to be comfortable with failure, and to learn from others. Admittedly, none of those are the default mode in most online spaces. But that is all the more reason to equip students with a sense of positive citizenship in digital spaces.

Let’s look again at the questions I outlined above that are fundamental to a liberal arts education:

• How do we know what’s true?
• Where does authority come from?
• How do we evaluate sources?
• How is knowledge created?
• How is that knowledge used to change the world?

Answering those questions requires serious engagement with the environments where truth, authority, knowledge, and influence are being constructed and contested for our students. There is no way to empower them to transform the world without attending to digital citizenship — by offering them the tools to take a critical stance toward digital environments and to engage with empathy and a sense of civic responsibility.

Digital citizenship in action

Consider the example of Wikipedia. When it first emerged, many faculty tried to draw a boundary between it and academic work. Now it is considered a powerful tool that many students and educators depend on regularly. You may still have concerns about how reliable or appropriate it is for a given activity in a college course, but there is no denying its influence. That influence demands our attention if we believe our job is to help students assess and create knowledge.

I anticipate a similar trajectory with AI. It can be laughably inaccurate for now, but what will really matter is its influence. When our students come across something online that is incorrect, that is an opportunity to talk about bias, about productive engagement, and about our responsibility to create better digital spaces.

One new resource I like that helps start those conversations is the book Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online by Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg, which provides students a practical toolkit for developing digital literacy. Others I have used and recommended are the books and accompanying online courses for Calling Bullshit and Third Millennium Thinking. Both offer excellent frameworks for discerning misinformation and disinformation.

As the influence of AI grows, students will need the skills to assess their tools and environments — to ask who built them and with what motivations. Countering the algorithmic bias, inaccessible design, and predatory business models inherent in many digital products requires the skills that come with a liberal arts education.

Digital Citizenship + Liberal Arts = Students Empowered for Life, a case study in The EDUCAUSE Review, makes a similar argument — that we must ask, “how our everyday lives are affected by the integral role digital systems and networks play in our communications, interactions, policies, and practices.”

The initiatives profiled in that article demonstrate how the sometimes messy work of digital citizenship closely aligns with a liberal arts mission. It shows students using digital tools to question their perspective, explore unfamiliar cultural contexts, develop interdisciplinarity, create new works, and improve their communication.

Where our responsibility lies

Higher ed has always taught students to question sources, identify agendas, understand a diversity of viewpoints, and become alert to what informs their thinking. These characteristics of literacy, critical thinking, and analysis are the building blocks of a liberal arts foundation.

I hope most readers working in higher education will agree that our responsibility is not simply to deliver the content we are experts in and to prepare students for professional careers. We are also shaping the people who will shape society. We are empowering them to transform their communities. We are encouraging them to think about what they have to say to the world.

Challenges such as climate change and social inequities require engaged citizens who will go beyond reproducing existing knowledge, systems, and practices to questioning and transforming them. If we take seriously that citizenship of that kind is a key part of the liberal arts mission, then we have to take digital citizenship just as seriously.