Keywords

1 Introduction: The Rise of Digital Literacy Pedagogical Sessions (#DLPS)

Digital literacy has become an essential framework for engaging with digital platforms in everyday life. (Livingstone, 2004; Masterman, 1985). However, we still struggle with understanding the impacts and ramifications of the rapid shift to a  culture of connectivity (van Dijck, 2009, 2013) and how young people respond to this change. We are too often limited by the dominance of big tech for-profit companies, the so-called GAMAM (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft), which lack insights from digital human rights perspective.  Additionally, discussions about impact and responses often focus on individual users rather than on collective experiences. This is despite the fact that these platforms significantly shape and shift the makeup and meaning of marginalized and vulnerable communities and groups, influencing political, social, and cultural aspects. Therefore, how should we design pedagogical sessions on digital literacy? How are Portuguese young people affected by the increasing use of digital platforms in their daily lives, and what are their responses?

Portugal has a population of more than 10 million people and an Internet Penetration of 78% rate, with 49% of the Portuguese reportedly using Facebook and 24% reportedly using WhatsApp to share news (Reuters, 2022). With disinformation posing a challenge to the survival of democracies worldwide, a new Portuguese law was approved in May 2021, establishing the Portuguese Charter on Human Rights. This initiative puts Portugal at the forefront of efforts to combat disinformation. In addition to ensuring human digital rights, freedoms, and guarantees for citizens in their online environment, the legislation establishes that the state must protect citizens from people who produce, reproduce, and disseminate misinformation. This aligns with the European Action Plan against Disinformation, which is based on four core pillars, namely (i) improving the capabilities of European Union institutions to detect, analyze, and expose disinformation; (ii) strengthening coordinated and joint responses to disinformation; (iii) mobilizing private sector to tackle disinformation; and (iv) raising awareness and improving societal resilience (European Commission, 2018: 5).

With the rise of social media platforms, the spread of misinformation and disinformation has intensified globally. Propaganda and disinformation which once required detailed planning, can now be disseminated through platforms using algorithms (Gillespie, 2010; Howard, 2020). This culture of misinformation and disinformation endangers democracy and human rights, leading to a biased public sphere where objective facts are overshadowed by personal opinions and emotions in public debate. In the past decade, digital technologies and how young people use them have changed dramatically. Most teenagers use their smartphones daily, and almost twice as much as ten years ago (Baym, 2015). While platforms offer opportunities and benefits—enabling young people to interact with others, learn online, acquire job skills, and be entertained—these gains come with risks. These risks include exposure to disinformation and the potential to become passive users of these platforms (Barbosa & Back, 2020).

The chapter is composed of three parts. The first section provides a brief a literature review on the field of digital literacy and introduces the #Digital Literacy Pedagogical Sessions (DLPS) as a case study. The second section explains why the digital literacy sessions were selected for the case study, emphasizing the participatory educational initiatives. The third section is dedicated to discussing the methodology. The final section presents the lessons learned from the case study, highlighting its strong potential to increase youth participation and offering policy recommendations.

2 Digital Literacy as an “Umbrella” Concept

Digital literacy can be broadly defined as the development of knowledge, skills, and attitudes to provide users with essential framework for effective lifelong engagement with media messages on platforms (Christian, 2020: 7). It is a combination of literacy (learning how to read and write) and digital everyday life (learning how to use and engage with platforms). Here, the focus relies on #DLPS as a testbed applied in the Portuguese schools, as well as broader educational contexts. It aims to promote the dissemination of critical knowledge produced in the broader areas of social sciences, and humanities particularly through stimulating critical debates around the main challenges of contemporary democracies related to the platform society (van Dijck et al., 2018).

To contribute to the democratization of knowledge, the promotion of digital human rights is an essential clue. #DLPS advocates for participatory interaction, as well as bottom-up formats of pedagogy to foster basic competencies of digital literacy as an indispensable public value to nurture future generations. It also stimulates the construction of an ecology of knowledge toward an inclusive, fair, and democratic society oriented to understanding digital reality to transform it and promote interventions (Tygel & Kirsch, 2016: 109). #DLPS has an approach based on collective learning that aims to make young people aware of how information travels faster on social media platforms while people live multiple online/offline lives. To do so, the pedagogical session enables young people to actively interrogate the digital infrastructure of platforms (van Dijck, 2020). As Hintz et al. (2018) remind us: “We cannot simply be seen as users of digital tools. The digital world is embedded in our lives and the larger structure that governs them” (2018: 16).

#DLPS was chosen as a case study for four main reasons: (i) to improve existing theoretical framework about policy interventions in digital literacy field, paying special attention to the Portuguese context; (ii) to foster public policies based on the different geographical and cultural school communities at an earlier educational stage; (iii) to adopt advanced methods, develop and validate instruments by using a range of participatory pedagogies to ensure digital literacy as powerful tool to nurture future generations; (iv) to develop a user-friendly pedagogical toolkit to be used in Portugal, EU and beyond. In sum, #DLPS reveals a sense of young people belonging that absorbs the diversity of the challenges of everyday digital life, while it provides a high degree of autonomy through the engagement of communal knowledge acquired by young participants and recommended to be used as practice of intervention in the coming future.

3 From Participatory Pedagogies to Platform Pedagogies

Helmond (2015) defines platform as a set of relationships, determinants, state, and market positioning all mediated through digital technologies. And what are their implications for pedagogies? Markham suggests that academics, teachers, and scholars should use long training in pedagogy and teaching and knowledge of interpretive and inductive/emergent methods of analysis to create better literacies in order  “to help people to find modes and means of critically examining and understanding the contexts within which they are drawn into a neoliberal position through the seemingly innocuous practices of such things as making and sharing images, clicking on links, turning on the smartphone’s GPS” (Markham, 2019: 759). While, Sefton-Green (2021) explores the relationship between platforms pedagogy and pedagogicisation of everyday life. The author dives into pedagogy to explain how people engage and interact with platforms: “paying particular attention to how users learn or are subjected to norms and behaviors as they read and write their section on digital platforms” (2021: 2) and how this relationship requires human agency within a larger process of control and re-conceptualization (2021: 10).

From participatory pedagogies to platform pedagogies, the #DLPS aimed to value the cultural and social aspects of platforms, support bottom-up educational pedagogies through mutual learning and strengthen participatory approaches (Barbosa, 2020). #DLPS provides practical experiences and knowledge exchange, such as presentations of the participants to the tutor through ice-breaking sessions; small talks followed by critical insights of the platform society, historical processes and their institutions of how platform power governs public and private life (Zuboff, 2019); and game dynamics on how to fight mis/disinformation. The goal is to activate meaningful engagement in collective teaching practices, while developing a critical consciousness into the digital world in a post-session moment.

Furthermore, young participants were presented to nominate their everyday routine on and with platforms, motivating themselves to be challengers, while creating forms of intervention in practical terms (Freire, 1968). #DLPS sessions provide Portuguese young people a direct contact with those who were carrying out initiatives related to interrogate and subvert the historical reflection on the development of platforms (van Dijck, 2014). Thus, the pedagogical format of the sessions promoted bottom-up discussions that were accompanied by “rodas de conversa” lasting 10–20 min at the end of each session. There, young people are invited to reflect together on their own practice experiences within platforms and provide feedback for their peers, while learning with each other.

4 Methods

#DLPS was developed under the guidance of CES—Centre for Social Studies, laboratory associated to the University of Coimbra. The so-called CES GOES TO SCHOOL (CVE) project constitutes one of the CES strategies for the dissemination of scientific culture, thus striving to foster contacts between its researchers and the wider community. To this extent, CES invites Portuguese schools to participate in the CVE project annually. This outreach project, which takes place between November and June of each academic year, is dedicated to students of various levels of education (2nd and 3rd cycles of basic and secondary education). It aims to contribute to the dissemination of knowledge produced in the different areas of social sciences humanities, through sharing the research work developed at CES and promoting debate around it. During 2022, CVE reached a noteworthy number of 4638 students in 91 sessions presented at Portuguese schools by CES researchers.

The #DLPS pedagogical sessions took place in 2021–2022 (3 selected schools)—Figueira da Foz, Peniche and Lisbon—and 2022–2023 (13 selected schools)—Sao Joao do Estoril, Arcozelo (Vila Nova de Gaia), Oliveira do Hospital, Aveiro, Ponte da Barca, Braga, Carregal do Sal, Porto, Vila Real, Leiria, Meda, Penacova—with the participation of the Portuguese schools involved with topics related to the agenda of digital literacy. The time period was up to two hours raging according to each school schedule. Most of the audience were young people between 12 and 18 years old. The selection of schools was done by the announcement on CES GOES TO SCHOOL web page, in collaboration with partner organizations, and with the full support of the project coordination team. The Portuguese schools were able to contact the researcher responsible for each seminar and book the pedagogical seminar through the online system. After the sessions, schoolteachers and students were invited to evaluate the school session.

To achieve its goal, #DLPS created a pedagogical toolkit applied to young people between 12 and 18 years old of elementary and high schools in Portugal. At the same time, it provided conditions for Ph.D. students to learn new techniques, gain access to information about digital literacy initiatives, instruments, and methods little explored at initial educational stages. The structure to create the session outline was conducted in three phases: (i) Desk Research of digital literacy: discussing the methodology and learning participatory (pedagogical) approaches.  The desk research of digital literacy enabled the tutors to identify the driving forces of pedagogical practices and community values; (ii) Write-up the #DLPS teaching outline: showing how young people can absorb digital literacy skills knowledge from an earlier educational stage. Co-development of improvements of interventions considered promising for fostering digital human rights with the goal to provide policy makers with the knowledge on how to implement digital literacy sessions as effective long-term strategy, as well as to safeguard democracy in the coming future; iii) final discussion with the research team and application of #DLPS sessions all over Portugal. Integration of results with key EU policymakers’ decisions, leading to the development of evidence-based policy recommendations to EU and Portuguese authorities. Table 1 shows how these topics embraced the #DLPS initiative, which issues related to digital literacy field were brought up by them, and reveals how youth organized in a participatory manner to interact with each other through a constructive pedagogical format.

Table 1 Main features of # digital literacy pedagogical sessions (DLPS)
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5 #DLPS Outline

Ice-Breaking Session: The warm-up activity facilitates the beginning of interaction with the tutor. The challenge is to answer the four following questions in 20 s: What is your name? How old are you? What is your favorite hobby? And which platform do you most use?

Chat Apps and Affordances: This section points out the difference between the affordances of three chat platforms. It presents the main technological features of WhatsApp and Telegram, while disclosing the non-profit messaging service named Signal (Barbosa & Milan, 2019; Milan & Barbosa, 2020). Signal is presented to the young audience as an open-source project that is the favorite messaging platform among digital rights activists. It also supports one-to-one voice and video calling, like the siblings WhatsApp and Telegram. It performs end-to-end encryption (West, 2019), and it is developed/maintained by a non-profit Signal Foundation (Ermoshina & Musiani, 2019; Musiani & Ermoshina, 2017). From 2022, Meredith Whittaker became the president of Signal, while Brian Acton (former Yahoo! employee and WhatsApp co-creator) provided a loan of $50 million to transform Signal massive worldwide (Whittaker, 2023). The section also highlights that Signal is the safest chap app to send/receive nudes (Coding Rights, 2016).

Fact-Checking Platforms: To highlight the spread of dis/misinformation, this section presents the main fact-checking platforms available in Portugal. It discusses how to overcome dis/misinformation barriers by enhancing digital skills and competencies from the early educational age. Most of them narrate situations on how they check if the information is accurate or not. The section also points out the importance of accessing the library of the school.

Digital Colonialism: The idea of this section is to show and critically discuss the so-called Map of Internet Territories to illustrate the physical and geopolitical dimensions of the Internet structure (Varon et al., 2022). According to the authors of this project, the use of the term “cloud” refers to an imaginary technology that exists in the absence of a place or territory, something immaterial, abstract, timeless, and apolitical. But when the materialization of the cloud reaches different countries, the power relations become visible, from the physical infrastructure layer to the sphere of algorithmic decisions. In practice, oppressive relations, practices of digital colonialism, and establishment of monopolies are evident when students look at the map (Couldry & Mejias, 2018; Ghai et al., 2022). From the lens of the cartographic activity of the discipline geography, this section takes into account that situating where the students fit in all its dimensions of intersectionality such as gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, culture, and nationality also matters in their relationship with the technology. Varon et al (2022) show that the Internet is a contested territory. To dispute it, it is necessary to know its dynamics through an engaged process of pedagogy. In addition, the map serves as a tool to kick-off conversations about digital colonialism and the role of technologies in the climate and socio-environmental justice debate.

Digital Literacy Gamified: In this section, we play the Go Viral! game (Go! Viral Game). The tutor shows how through ludic strategies the game helps to understand misinformation. In fact, Go Viral! nurture participants against COVID-19 misinformation, while highlighting the most common strategies used to spread false and misleading information about the virus. The idea is that young people will be able to fight dis/misinformation the next time they came across online (Hertwig & Grune-Yanoff, 2017). People who share misinformation often believe the information they are sharing is accurate (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). Lastly, it starts a small talk about Inoculation as psychological tool to prevent misinformation; in other words, it is a preemptive intervention that exposes people to a weakened form of common disinformation and/or manipulation strategies in order to build up their ability to resist misinformation and manipulation (Kumpulainen et al., 2020).

Roda de Conversa: The last section entitled “roda de conversa” shows a digital collage (Fig. 1) to conclude the pedagogical seminar, while generating food for thought. COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the depth of how important is to be online and how digital environments are becoming more and more complex. Globally, 71% of young people aged between 15 and 24 use the Internet (Global Connectivity Report, 2022), far more than any other age group, and in every country for which data are available, they are more likely to use the Internet than the rest of the population. By picking up one of the pictures shown in the digital collage, each student narrates an episode within the platforms and we promote a roda de conversation.

Fig. 1
A collage of various overlapping images in the digital world. It includes Kanye West, bitcoin, Wi-Fi symbol, rainbow, toilet paper, shoes, watermelon, iPhone, burger, and others.

Digital collage. Source Xanthe Dobbie Harriet (2018) still from the series “Wallpaper Queens”

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6 Discussion

The data discussed here is derived from the own author’s teaching experience. #DLPS provided both a reflection to activate youth generation through a bottom-up educational process, as well as foster digital literacy as key competence. The discussion sheds light on how young people responded to the #DLPS sessions, mediated by various stakeholders—educators, teachers, school community, and academic tutors. #DLPS concern is precisely to inform the challenges to discuss how “new media, particularly social networking sites, gives all of us, including young people, opportunities to share our civic identity and to connect with others about civic issues” (Christian, 2020: 244). After all, youth participants acquired critical skills by fostering a culture of engagement and critical discourse. Most of the young participants reported having smartphones and proved to be active users of social media platforms, which facilitated the curiosity about the topic discussion. Youth have been aware to share interesting doubts and pave the ways to engage during the seminars.

The pedagogical format of the seminar connected the knowledge acquired through the digital literacy initiative in which youth establish an intermittent dialogue to recognize and promote their agency. From this point of view, how can the lessons learned from the pedagogical initiative contribute to ignite even more intervention of Portuguese young people on this topic? What may change in participants’ view of everyday digital life after this experience? The initiative not only fostered interactive and participatory approaches, but also revealed to be a pilot test to implement pedagogical activities at the school level. In other words: a bottom-up educational initiative to encourage young people to booster alternative solutions, thus paving a new orientation toward a fair digital ecosystem led by youth (Adjin-Tettey, 2022). In fact, digital literacy initiatives have become a key tool for education mainly after the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand how this influence processes occur, we should also look at how young people behave after the pedagogical session moments.

Young people did not choose intentionally to become passive users of platforms, however, the unpredictable, ongoing changes and transformations that participants created during these sessions served as a clue to keep them in the loop to be well informed about current opportunities and perils of platforms. The pedagogical initiative reveals that young participants are more and more curious about their personal interests and less about the issue of readjusting and qualifying their practice experience through platforms. On the other hand, the seminar promotes an engaged way to self-reflect about their everyday routine with digital platforms. It inaugurated a creative way to adapt the teaching curricula through participatory pedagogy. It advocates a new format of a teaching format, beyond the need to rely only on technological literacy as end-user. Here, digital literacy and participatory education combined foster a pedagogy to combat oppressive power structures—digital colonization, algorithmic violence, gender violence, class divides, and racism, among other forms of violence (Calzati, 2021), as well as to support cross-sector collaboration and new models for exchange on how to transgress the geopolitical power of the GAMAM. At the same time, the interrogation of platform dominance played in the Global North means also to be ready to overcome barriers of disinformation, while enhancing digital skills and competences from an early educational age.

#DLPS articulated educative, practice and accessible communication on the (digital) relationship since the advent of the Internet and related social media platforms (Marres, 2017; Baym, 2015). In this sense, #DLPS launched pedagogical instruments through an “engaged” approach (Milan, 2010), whereby the needs and values of promoting digital literacy educational initiatives become an integral part of the young people agenda which indicates an effort to social inquiry, making a difference for the community under study. It is noteworthy that digital literacy is not restricted to an open manner and training skills for the digital age (European Union, 2019). More than that: it is a continuum educative process of communication through which time to time, it is needed to be adapted and updated to target and nurture the digital skilled generation of young people, while to make them possible agents of intervention, presenting their points of view and their perspectives toward others, challenging themselves. It opens creative imaginaries after a discussion based on pedagogical approaches by and for young people.

In addition, #DLPS has been boosted by critical warnings about the use of platforms, considering that “rethinking democracy in the social media age must be multifaceted, thoughtful, collaborative and evidence-based” (Margetts, 2019: 120). In fact, the boundaries of public and private young people’s engagement on platforms are most of the times very blurred (Boyd, 2014; Common Sense Media, 2012; Cortesi et al., 2020). Based on the #DLPS initiative, Table 2 suggests the following policy recommendations to the Portuguese government, European Commission, and European Parliament:

Table 2 Policy recommendations
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7 Moving Forward: Toward Pluriversal Pedagogies in a Postdigital Future

This chapter presented Digital Literacy Pedagogical Sessions (#DLPS) as a pedagogical tool to foster public values community practices, as well as to promote a critical understanding of the digital society in which young people are increasingly immersed. At the same time, it promotes the critical capacity to distinguish the quality and accuracy of information conveyed, particularly highly disseminated on and through platform ecosystem. Thus, if no concrete policy intervention is implemented to address the spread of false information, we will likely witness an increased denial of scientific expertise, reduced adherence to vaccinations among everyday citizens, and escalating political polarization on a global level (Roozenbeek et al., 2022). This process leads to the erosion of democratic values through the distortion of the public debate and numerous disinformation campaigns (Donovan & Wardle, 2020).

Many educational programs have already been established  based on for-profit values under GAMAM group (van Dijck et al., 2018). However, in the context of the European Year of Youth (2022), the chapter suggests a two-pronged innovative  approach. First, we should rethink and update traditional methods of developing and implementing digital literacy initiatives by undertaking three core practical actions: (i) returning to democratic principles by positioning young people as a central component of society, thereby fostering digital literacy initiatives at primary schools; (ii) empowering young people to act as promoters of human agency from an earlier educational level and (iii) avoiding the limitation of knowledge to a select group of experts, and instead promoting a recursive, iterative, transdisciplinary, and pedagogical process that engages young people, better informing them about their roles regarding the opportunities and risks of a platform society. Second, while exploring creative ways to disseminate new pedagogical formats, we should reinvent how governments and public authorities engage with young people. Academic experts could post training content on platforms using creative videos and short messages, ensuring that accurate information is accessible and adaptable to young people (Spurava & Kotilainen, 2022).

Far from providing a comprehensive pedagogical agenda, this chapter serves as a starting proposal for an innovative educational curriculum that integrates digital literacy into mandatory subjects such as geography, history, chemistry, physics, and math at the school level. This approach aims to better nurture young people and inform them about the spread of inaccurate content during turbulent political times (Margetts et al., 2016), while implementing best practices to combat polarization today. In conclusion, policy recommendations should be grounded in the everyday practices of young people as agents of social intervention and promoters of critical consciousness. Only through this approach can pluriversal pedagogical paths be co-designed by and for young people at the community level in a post-digital future (Escobar, 2018; Macgilchrist et al., 2024; Zakharova & Jarke, 2022). Future research should focus on improving #DLPS as a pedagogical platform through co-design (Costanza-Chock, 2020) and co-teaching (Pfeifer & Jovicic, 2023).