Educational systems are the product of analogical and virtual relationships between several actors, interacting with each other in different contexts and at different levels. With the digital age and after the COVID-19 situation, the relationships among the different components of the school – starting from peers and teachers – need to be intentionally aligned and designed to achieve citizenship outcomes (Khan & Obiakor, 2020): political engagement, in fact, is changing with the pervasiveness of information flows through digital technologies, creating new opportunities for political participation (ICCS, 2023).

This project aims to explore, according to a qualitative-quantitative approach, citizenship education in school contexts, reflecting on the possible link between digital skills and relational aspects within the classroom environment.

The investigation starts from the reflections on the network society (Castells, 2004), the categorization of students and teachers according to the meanings of digital natives or immigrants (Prensky, 2001) and visitors or residents (White, Le Cornu, 2011), and the relative upgrade to the concept of citizenship, based on the definition postulated by Ribble (2011).

The pedagogical framework recovers the thought of the democratic school of Dewey (1915), who defines the school as a place of democratic action stressing how this environment must lead the young generations to share values, behaviors and ways of being through experience. In a world inhabited by avatars, the educational system must also recover the idea of citizenship as a concrete action aimed at the well-being of the community (Maritain, 1947); this reflection linked the training of the student and the education of the citizen, assuming the class group as a space of social belonging, guided by values such as altruism, cooperation and solidarity. These two pedagogical reflections blend in the phenomenological perspective of Bertolini (2003) and his link between schools and political education; the principal task of the school is to educate students thinking about them primarily in their civic role (today both analogical and digital), focusing on the promotion of helpful tips that can be used in classroom as well as in society.

Over the years, the legislative directions has been enriched with numerous documents about citizenship education in school (Eurydice Report, 2017; European Council Recommendation on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning, 2019). The last European Framework (DigComp 2.2, 2022) specifies the citizenship competence as “the ability to act as responsible citizens and to fully participate in civic and social life” (p. 2) and specifies the interconnection between real and virtual world, highlighting knowledge,skills and attitudes for both of these living environments. In particular, the Area 2 (Communication and Collaboration) outlines “the ability to have a critical understanding of and interact with both traditional and new forms of media and understand the role and functions of media in democratic societies” (p. 3).

The project is in line with the interest for civic education in Italy, returned thanks to Law 92/2019 which establishes the reintroduction of Civic Education as a cross-disciplinary subject, unfortunately still lacking clear references for teachers and headmasters. The interest is twofold: to understand how the school context is dealing with the training of students and teachers as digital citizens and to value if digital citizenship programs can have positive effects on classroom climate. The classroom climate is the result of the creation of a significant relational network, composed of emotional and motivational elements, as well as the co-construction of objectives (Polito, 2000).

Starting from these considerations, the work assumes that education have to think about a new idea of digital citizenship education, which lies at the interconnection between digital skills and relational competences and can also prevent bullying and cyberbullying events.

These premises materialize into a participatory action-research (A-R) project (Pourtois, 1981; Baldacci, 2001, 2017) carried out into three secondary schools in Bari and Andria (Italy). The project runs from autumn 2021 to spring 2023, involving over 250 students and 40 teachers. At the same time, mixed methods approach has been used to control the assumption, using in a synergistic way qualitative and quantitative instruments. The hypothesis is that the co-building of research pathways would increase individual citizenship skills and can positively influence school relations and classroom climate. Learning environments and digital citizenship skills were investigated through preliminary surveys (Pizzolorusso, 2021, 2022). The training course (four meetings) was conducted to examine teachers’ representations about the citizenship skills of students, the importance of adults in their promotion, the idea of classroom climate and the role of the teacher in climate structuring. The other three planning meetings were useful to organize the project proposal defining themes and instruments of the work. The starting point for the planning of the activities was the “Manifesto della Comunicazione Non Ostile”, promoted by Parole O_Stili. This association is addressed to all citizens aware of the fact that the virtual world is real, and that hostility on the Net has concrete, serious, and permanent consequences in people's lives. A further Parole O_Stili objective is to promote a widespread awareness of individual responsibilities between real and digital. The shared design has created a path of eight meetings in classrooms; the events (based on Area 2 of DigComp 2.2 and coordinated by the researcher and different teachers) focused on aspects such as identity building, the importance of offline relationships and digital detox, stereotypes and prejudices, positive communication strategies, cooperation and respect of the rules in order to promote, on the web as well as in the classroom, inclusive environments. To collect their impressions during the meetings, teachers used a diary (Kenmis & McTaggart, 1982). Classroom Social Climate questionnaire (Pérez, Ramos & López, 2010), adapted in Italian language, was used to collect the quantitative data related to classroom climate. The questionnaire consists in 44 items and is organized around specific sub-dimensions (interest and personal satisfaction, relationship with classmates and teachers, levels of competitiveness, communication, cooperation, system of rules, group cohesion and physical organization of the classroom), allowing a system of responses through a 4-step Likert scale, from 1 (Not at all) to 4 (Always).

The project build an educational proposal able to respond to the digital transformation through the citizenship education, identifying human and relational dimensions at the origin of the technological question. The quantitative and qualitative outcomes (Ponce & Pagàn-Maldonado, 2015) confirm the initial hypothesis, underlining the existence of a positive association between citizenship education paths, the exercise of digital skills, and the improvement of the classroom climate. In particular, the results confirmed a statistically significant enhancement in the classroom climate within the groups involved; at the same time, the qualitative analysis of the focus groups with teachers and circle time with students highlight how the reflections about classroom climate have led the teachers to enhance the dynamics of coexistence, giving value to the digital experiences of students. The conclusions opens spaces for reflection about citizenship education in school contexts as a tool to improve relations between peers and with teachers; as the project demonstrated, thanks to the development of collaborative activities between real and digital environments, students had the opportunity to increase their knowledge about the onlife reality, acquiring behaviors and values to be exercised starting from the classroom environment. Moreover, the outcomes suggest the promotion of specific teacher training paths, in order to link digital themes with relational dynamics at school; to educate the citizen even before the student, learning environments have to build a shared language between young people and adults, linking the reflection about digital life to issues such as awareness, responsibility and participation. Through specific training paths, teachers must consider the role of technologies, studying their purposes and their effects on students. This means emphasizing their responsibility to gain awareness of the importance of students' virtual life and initiating classroom discussions about the critical, conscious and collaborative use of digital tools, not only for didactic goals.

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