Digital platforms have become deeply embedded in everyday life, encompassing lean platforms, social media, urban systems platforms, and service administration platforms. While these platforms enhance operational efficiency and facilitate connections, they also pose societal challenges, such as reduced participation in decision-making, altered political dynamics, growing wealth inequalities, and declining trust in public institutions (Bilić et al., 2021; George, 2020). Among these, GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft) play a pivotal role in shaping public opinion, labor organization, configurations of power (Cuppini et al., 2024) and political discourse (Mezzadra et al., 2024).

Plartforms’ influence raises questions about how digital platformization impacts democracy (Mönnig & Manouchehri, 2024), emphasizing the need for educational interventions to foster critical digital literacy (Klikauer, 2021), while also revealing a broader lack of explicit recognition of digital citizenship in the political and social interactions shaped by these platforms.

The project SwissINCA builds on these challenges by exploiting a modular educational toolkit, developed within the Horizon INCA project, aimed at empowering lower secondary school students to critically engage with the complexities of platformized society. The modular toolkit addresses the erosion of a coordinated and equal political debate, due to a techno-political arena and more in general democratic institutions accelerated by digital transformations, taking action in the educational setting to: a) empower students as digital society actors and civil pillars of democracy; b) define forms to sustain new models of governance capable to combine the growth of platforms with social and political inclusion and citizens’ participation in decision-making processes. On this basis, the module seeks to achieve the following objectives:

1. Raise students' awareness of digital platforms and their societal implications.
2. Foster critical thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of platform capitalism.
3. Equip students with practical tools to assess the impact of digital platforms on democracy and daily life.
4. Provide teachers with a streamlined and easily usable module on these themes, adaptable to their specific contexts.

The conceptual framework draws on theories of digital literacy (OECD, 2022), platform capitalism (Mezzadra et al., 2024), and democratic education (Council of Europe, 2018). It situates education as a transformative tool to prepare students for participatory roles in a society increasingly mediated by digital platforms. Platforms, in fact, create hybrid social and political spaces. As such, they allow for the co-construction of skills required for living in a platformized world while helping provide the level of political and digital literacy needed to avoid becoming a casualty of technological disruption (Bignami et al., 2024). The project’s relevance lies in its European dimension, addressing the shared challenges of platformization across different educational contexts.

The educational toolkit is structured into five sections, covering key aspects of digital platformization such as: 1. Introduction to Digital Platforms: Exploring their nature, evolution, and integration into daily life. 2. Pros and Cons of Platform Capitalism: Examining the economic and societal advantages and disadvantages. 3. Big Data: Understanding its role in platform capitalism and implications for privacy and democracy. 4. Nature and Infrastructure of Digital Platforms: Analyzing their structures and functionalities. 5. GAFAM and Democracy: Investigating the impact of major platforms on democratic processes. Each section is designed to flexibly fit within a 4–8 lesson framework, adaptable to various timetables and educational systems. The testing phase takes place between January and Spring 2025 in two lower secondary school classes in Ticino and Italy. Regular exchanges with teachers and experts are provided for the iterative refinement of the module. Regarding evaluation and process-mapping activities the data collection involves: - Teacher Interviews: Evaluating simplicity of implementation, alignment with curricula, and perceived educational value. - Student Focus Groups and Questionnaires: Assessing knowledge acquisition, self-awareness, and engagement with the content through focus group discussions and structured questionnaires - Classroom Observations: Documenting interactions and engagement during lesson delivery. The study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative insights from interviews and focus groups with quantitative measures of learning outcomes. The data collected are instrumental in refining and enhancing the module, ensuring it effectively meets the educational needs of students and teachers. The final release of the module is equipped with a short and practical vademecum for the implementation of the module itself, suggesting settings, activities, and procedural aspects to facilitate its delivery to teachers and students. At the end of the project the module is freely available for teachers and any actor in the formal, non-formal and informal educational field, but can be also leveraged as basis for political debates and discussions. This user guide is created in collaboration with the experts and the teachers involved in the project.

This initiative is expected to yield several key outcomes: - A validated and adaptable educational module (with a user guide) for fostering literacy on the convergence between digital platforms and social, political and democratic life, and co-constructing critical digital citizenship skills in secondary schools. - Translated materials in English, French, German, and Italian, enhancing accessibility for diverse European and international educators. - Evidence-based insights into how digital citizenship education can address societal challenges posed by platformization. The expected results center on equipping students with a deeper understanding of the societal roles and implications of digital platforms. Through engagement with the module, students are expected to improve critical thinking skills, enabling them to critically evaluate the impacts of platform capitalism on democracy. Furthermore, the module fosters student engagement by linking content to their daily experiences, addressing contemporary challenges posed by digital platformization. These outcomes are designed to support educators in creating meaningful learning experiences that align with diverse educational contexts and priorities. This project’s broader contribution lies in establishing a groundbreaking line of research that bridges theoretical perspectives on digital citizenship education with practical classroom applications, drawing on key references such as Klikauer (2021) and Mezzadra et al. (2024) to underscore the urgency of equipping future generations with critical skills to navigate the societal transformations driven by digital platforms. The innovative approach taken in this study emphasizes tools and methodologies to address educational challenges posed by a platformized democraticy. Particularly, the exploitation of the module aims to elaborate on the politically conscious co-construction of skills that requires active engagement in online and offline spaces, where individuals can contribute to communities of shared interests. These fully-fledged digital citizens will be capable of navigating and critically assessing such spaces achieving greater political, economic, and social relevance.

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