Session Information
31 ONLINE 22 A, Digital Citizenship Education and Foreign Languages: challenges for foreign language teachers
Symposium
MeetingID: 867 9519 8404 Code: kK90NS
Contribution
Digital Citizenship Education and Foreign Language Learning (DiCE.Lang) is a transnational European Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project aiming to strengthen the profile of Digital Citizenship Education in the context of foreign language education. DiCE.Lang will be realised by a project consortium with experts from five European universities and research centres. Since digital citizenship at the intersection of foreign language education (FLE) is truly a transnational European challenge, partners as diverse as Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia and Portugal will unite their various areas of expertise (e.g. foreign language didactics, citizenship pedagogy and digital education) into a shared project marked by both context-sensitivity and multi-perspectivity. This potential will generate educational innovations that strengthen today’s learners to become the citizens of tomorrow’s Europe in an era of digital transformation.
Digital Citizenship Education (DCE) has emerged as a supranational priority, seeking to empower younger citizens to participate actively and responsibly in a digital society and to foster their skills of using digital technologies effectively and critically. In order to facilitate the implementation of DCE in schools and in curricula across Europe, subject-specific adaptations are required which are, however, still lacking. This would include a thorough adaptation of DCE principles and objectives into FLE – a field at the heart of a unified vision of European education that involves the fostering of foreign language competencies needed for intercultural communication, mutual exchanges and civic action.
Against this backdrop, this three-year Erasmus+ project aims at modelling the specific perspectives of FLE into available European initiatives of DCE. This entails the following five dimensions:
- the foreign language component necessary for digital citizens to communicate in the digital world;
- an intercultural perspective to initiate cultural exchanges in digital environments;
- an identity component to strengthen learners’ personalities with respect to their online lives;
- a content perspective by relating current themes to digital transformations;
- a critical component for reflecting on the increasing digital transformation of society.
To reach this large-scale objective, DiCE.Lang will conceptualise how DCE can best be implemented in FLE by providing novel pathways into educational resources, professional development, and policy updates. These trajectories will hinge centrally on quantitative and qualitative research activities that yield the backdrop for the whole project. In detail, the project will produce four intellectual outputs:
- a survey to research teachers’ knowledge, skills and attitudes related to DCE, which will later be turned into a tool for teachers’ professional self-reflection;
- a comprehensive set of open educational resources available in English and additional European languages;
- a teacher training package for DCE in FLE providing various scalable opportunities for professional development;
- a new policy framework serving to guide adaptable implementations of DCE in FLE in local and national educational contexts across Europe.
To ensure that all objectives and outputs are reached, DiCE.Lang will employ a rigorous methodology moving from a survey-based, state-of-the-art analysis to the cyclical piloting, improvement and implementation of all educational resources and teacher training elements, and then up to the research-driven conceptualisation of a new policy framework. The project follows a sustainable open-access policy to ensure widespread European outreach, coupled with local, regional, national and European dissemination activities.
According to the projects’ intellectual outputs briefly described above, our symposium would be structured as follows:
Paper 1: DCE and its assessment
Paper 2: Survey
Paper 3: Open Educational Resources
Paper 4: Teacher Training Package
References
Council of Europe. (2019). Digital Citizenship Education Handbook. Council of Europe Publishing. Lütge, C. & Merse, T. (2022). Digital Citizenship in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching: Educating the Global Citizens of the Future. In: Lütge, Christiane/ Merse, Thorsten/ Rauschert, Petra (eds.) (2022 i.pr.): Global Citizenship in Foreign Language Education: Concepts, Practices, Connections. Routledge.
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