Exploring Preservice Teachers’ Digital Citizenship
Abstract: The purpose of this study is to explore preservice teachers’ conceptualization of digital citizenship from their current student and future teacher perspectives. Examination focuses on the lived and shared experiences of preservice teachers’ relationships and interactions with digital technologies and virtual environments, and how the participants presumed those relationships and interactions would change as their roles in education developed. Applying a digital citizenship scale that can be used to measure perceptions and abilities of levels of participation of young adults engaging in digital environments, data highlights that preservice teachers’ ideas and actions around digital citizenship are at a low level of media and information literacy both as university students and when they perceive themselves as classroom educators. Implications suggest that to increase preservice teacher knowledge to be adequate knowledge for practice, teacher preparation programs need to move away from the idea that digital citizenship is a static construct of online behavior to recognizing that it is a way to use connectivity for advanced and active global citizenship.