Preparing Digital Citizens for a Participatory Culture: Critical Digital Literacies in Pre-service Education
Abstract: The challenge of preparing teachers and their eventual students to be successful, full participants in today’s digital society is one that faces all teacher preparation programs. Technology integration strategies and models currently focus on technology skills development, although the TPACK framework has been used to address weaknesses in this approach. ISTE (2007, 2008) also identified “digital citizenship” as a necessary component of students’ and teachers’ successful participation in a digital society. However, critical and reflective understanding of the broader social and cultural contexts of technology use are largely absent from current technology instruction, nor are they explicitly addressed by TPACK. This conceptual/theoretical paper develops a definition and framework for critical digital literacies, and explores implications for using this framework in conjunction with TPACK to develop critical, reflective practitioners in pre-service technology course curricula.