I recently came across this article by Gianfranco Polizzi and Marina Cino Pagliarello which beings by describing the current state of media literacy and citizenship education in the United Kingdom, before calling for the inclusion of more media literacy content and material within the compulsory citizenship syllabus. It’s a good article, and, while the UK context is very different to the Australian one, not least because of the nature of the Citizenship subject, it does raise some interesting questions that I think have some relevance for Australian settings, too.
The part that I think is most pertinent is the recognition that, at least in some aspects, the division between media literacy and civic literacy is narrowing, as media of different forms becomes more and more important in all of our lives – and more omnipresent too – and this narrowing requires us to be more explicit in our teaching practice. This aspect is a particular weakness of Australia’s civic education programs, and perhaps, in some ways, media literacy and media education programs too. If civics and citizenship education is about teaching young people how to participate in and contribute to a functioning democracy, we need to recognise that civil (and sometimes uncivil) society exists online, and therefore we need to teach young people to navigate these online spaces effectively – indeed, failure to do so is a failure to prepare them to be active citizens (and indeed, prevents them from being active citizens currently, too).
This kind of education is present in some respects in different parts of the Australian Curriculum – there is some attention given to digital citizenship, for example, but to be honest, I don’t think it goes far enough, simply because it’s too focused on the kinds of behaviours one needs to practice in order to stay safe and secure online. I think this is important, but it is not enough to quality as citizenship, digital or otherwise – and that’s a real failing. In addition, I think the curriculum has fallen behind the challenges of social media, and the way that misinformation and disinformation spread quickly and are shared easily across different platforms. Civic education needs to address these challenges in a proactive manner, too.