‘Taking a Stand’ on Good Citizenship

by Carrie James and Emily Weinstein

For over a decade, we (Carrie and Emily) have been careful observers of young people’s experiences as they grow up in an age of radical connectivity. Our studies have spanned the ways digital life intersects with adolescents’ mental health and well-being, close relationships, civic development, and moral and ethical decision-making, among other topics.  

Our latest round of research has focused on digital dilemmas. We study dilemmas by digging into young people’s perspectives with a multi-generational research team that spans teens to Gen Xers. A regular part of our research team meetings involves squirming in our seats as we puzzle over dilemmas that demand consideration yet evade easy answers. If someone participates in a hateful protest, is it fair game to use social media to expose personal information that might in turn compromise their physical safety or employment? Is it okay to share violent videos online to call attention to what is happening in the world, even if the content is triggering to some viewers? When is it reasonable to expose and exploit people’s past posts and private messages? These dilemmas are timely, relevant, and vexed.  

For middle and high schoolers, social media use is now a routine aspect of everyday life. Interspersed with social updates and casual sharing, youth encounter more weighty civic posts and decision points about what to share, re-post, like, and screenshot, as well as what to follow, unfollow, mute, and avoid. Good citizenship in a connected world requires that young people have both knowledge and thinking dispositions to grapple with digital dilemmas. 

Although digital citizenship has been on schools’ agendas for some time, it often takes the form of cautionary tales and a list of “Don’ts” Don’t cyberbully. Don’t believe everything you read. Don’t post anything that could get you in trouble, kicked out of school, or denied a job opportunity.  

Supporting young people in a networked era requires approaches that meet the complexity of our times. In our work—using pedagogies that confront (rather than skirt) the complexity—we advocate educating with and for digital dilemmas. Over the last few years, we’ve worked in partnership with our colleagues at Common Sense Education, a leader in providing digital citizenship curricula (link here) and related supports to educators and schools.

With Common Sense, we’ve developed and field-tested a variety of resources and approaches that advocate using digital dilemmas as jumping off points for thoughtful classroom discussions. We’re especially excited about our new Digital Dilemmas and Thinking Routines resources (link here). 

Dilemma scenarios have long been used as signature tools in moral education. Readers of this blog are likely familiar, too, with The Good Project’s longstanding emphasis on powerful, thorny dilemmas. When our team started using digital dilemmas in the classroom, we found that they immediately sparked engagement and interest, in no small part because they are provocative and often directly relevant to students’ lives.  

But we also saw how youth (and even adults) can get stuck in their knee-jerk reactions. We wanted to help students look beyond their initial reactions; to support more nuanced consideration of their own views and more intentional dialogue with others’. This is all the more important because digital life can itself trap us in echo chambers where we only engage with perspectives that reinforce our own views. Good citizenship certainly requires broader consideration, and classroom discussions are an apt context for discussing dilemmas (link here) with others and debating pros and cons (link here) of different paths forward.  

Good thinking is foundational to digital citizenship—and to citizenship more broadly. We aim to help students develop dispositions that guide reflective, responsible, and ethical use of technology. These essential dispositions for digital life include slowing down to recognize dilemmas as they arise; reflecting on responsibilities to self, close relations, and wider communities; exploring perspectives (especially those that differ from one’s own); seeking facts and evidence to make informed decisions; and building agency through envisioning options and impacts, and taking actions that are both self-protective and socially responsible.  

How do we get there? In classroom practice, thinking routines (link here) are a powerful pedagogy to support dispositions (Ritchhart et al., 2011; Tishman et al., 1993), Taking direct inspiration from our Project Zero colleagues’ long standing work on thinking routines and dispositions, we created a routine called Take A Stand. Take a Stand is designed to support dispositions to slow down and reflect, and to discover one’s own perspective or stance while also exploring perspectives of others.  

Take A Stand: The protocol

In collaboration with teachers as well as our colleagues at Common Sense Education, we designed a classroom protocol called Take A Stand, which is designed to be used alongside dilemma scenarios. This four-step protocol gets students in the habit of considering and reconsidering their own and others' perspectives. It especially directs consideration to tensions between responsibilities to individuals and responsibilities to the wider world and civic life.  

Here’s an overview of the protocol: Take A Stand

What does Take A Stand look like in the classroom?

Kelly Erceg’s eighth grade classroom is situated in a public middle school the Los Angeles area. When she used the Take A Stand protocol, she paired it with a dilemma that enabled a powerful discussion about the ethics of streaming fights online.  

The topic was highly relevant on a number of levels. A recent public incident at nearby Disneyland had led to viral videos of a violent brawl that erupted between two members of the same family. The videos had received widespread attention/clicks and gave police evidence to file criminal charges that ultimately led to jail time for one of the aggressors. The fight was local news for Kelly’s students; they all seemed to know about it. This incident and concerns about a larger “record everything” culture sparked her interest in bringing the issue into her classroom. The school district’s recent launch of a 1:1 iPad policy, which gave students ongoing access to their own recording devices throughout the school day, was another motivator.  

“Streaming Fights” (link here) is a fictionalized dilemma scenario about students recording and streaming a fight between classmates. Pairing the dilemma with the Take a Stand routine invited students to share their own perspectives on the ethics of recording/posting violent incidents online and provided a structure to support listening to different views. As the conversation unfolded, students asserted stances across the spectrum from approval to disapproval and gave voice to different considerations. They wondered about instances when recording violence is for entertainment or for increasing one’s own views and popularity on social media versus instances when recording is carried out as an effort “to serve justice.” Whether and when to use mobile devices for recording purposes—a thorny dilemma—became an accessible topic for rich, purposeful classroom learning. 

Here are a few examples of student takeaways we’ve collected related to Take A Stand:

• “You have to be aware of the implications of your actions, not just from where it takes you but where it takes other people”

• “You need to look from multiple perspectives and make sure you know every outcome”

• “One thing I took away from today's activity was that if something big and negative is happening nearby, and [if] we have the power to try to stop it, we should, instead of posting it on social media.”

• “We have to take in consideration of others and posting may ruin their reputation.”

• “Once we take out our phones and start filming the problem we've automatically become part of it”

Digital dilemmas can offer an opportunity for talking with students about hard situations before they arise in students’ own lives. When we pair them with thinking routines like Take a Stand, we can build students’ sense of agency by supporting dispositions to envision options and possible impacts so they can make informed decisions in their real, radically connected lives.  

To read more about our disposition-centered approach to digital citizenship education, read our new report (link here).

Interested in using this routine to bring digital civic dilemmas into your classroom? See our Take A Stand Educator Guide (link here) and Student Handout (link here). Pair it with the Protest Dilemma (link here) or another dilemma in our Digital Dilemmas compilation (link here). Or, create your own dilemma that feels relevant to your context and students right now. 

Carrie James is a Research Associate and Principal Investigator at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research explores young people’s digital, civic, and moral lives.  

Emily Weinstein is a Senior Researcher at Project Zero. For the last decade, her work has focused how today’s technologies shape teens’ lives and development.  

Carrie and Emily currently co-direct the Digital Dilemmas (link here) and Reimagining Digital Well-being (link here) initiatives at Project Zero, which have been supported by Susan Crown Exchange, Germanacos Foundation, and funders of Common Sense Education. Weinstein and James are co-authors of the forthcoming book, Behind Their Screens: What Teens are Facing (and Adults are Missing) (The MIT Press). 

References

Ritchhart, R., Church, M., & Morrison, K. (2011). Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners. Jossey-Bass. 

Tishman, S., Jay, E., & Perkins, D. N. (1993). Teaching Thinking Dispositions: From Transmission to Enculturation. Theory Into Practice, 32(3), 147–153.

The Latest Reads: Our Summer Top 5

It’s mid-summer here in the United States, and our team members have each been enjoying a little summer reading and a few holidays away from work. Of course, while summer is often a time to slow down and recharge, world events these past few weeks have not slowed. The COVID pandemic continues to be with us and is entering a new phase of danger due to the delta variant; dangerous weather fueled by climate change has affected many countries; and the Olympic Games in Tokyo are well underway.

Below are a few articles that got us thinking recently. We invite you to read them and share your own thoughts.

• Vishal Kheptal, a physician working in Rhode Island, describes for Slate how the disparity in COVID vaccination rates in the United States is resulting in starkly different conditions on the ground for communities across the country. Most people expect physicians to do “good work” in their practice of medicine, and the difficult conditions that doctors respond to influence their understandings of excellence, ethics, and engagement on the job. These understandings will continue to change and adapt for many people depending on the pandemic’s local course (link here).

• The Good Project supports the free exchange of ideas and believes in the power of “better arguments” (link here). A major goal of our work has been to support the open discussion of values and views across groups. We have been troubled by the attempts of some lawmakers in the United States to pass laws that would prohibit educators from freely discussing ideas with their students, which have been targeted in particular at critical race theory. Four writers from across the political spectrum explain in the New York Times why these types of laws are in opposition to free speech and liberal education (link here).

• Gymnastics is a sport that often demands strong commitment from athletes from a young age. A popular dilemma from our database concerned a young gymnast who felt pressured to attend practices by her parents (link here). Echoing this situation, when champion gymnast Simone Biles stepped away from competition at the Tokyo Olympics, commentators like Jemele Hill in The Atlantic pointed out Biles’ bravery in countering the narrative of athletic invincibility and in potentially setting a precedent for others to take care of their mental health, rather than face the pressures of competition (link here).

• We have mentioned moral paragons like Mother Teresa (and others) as exemplars of “good work.” A new podcast series titled “The Turning,” summarized by Salon, reevaluates Mother Teresa’s legacy through the eyes of former nuns from the Missionaries of Charity, the order that she founded. The interviewees allege a culture within the order of total repression and silence that made it difficult to actually do good for the poor. The criticism from those close to Mother Teresa raises questions about aspects of her life and legacy, and subsequently those of other moral exemplars, that must now be looked at through a different lens (link here).

• Addressing climate change is taking on ever-increasing urgency, as recent heat waves and flooding events have demonstrated. The solution may seem like simply transitioning away from fossil fuels, but as Dr. Beverly Wright explains for The Hill, environmental justice is also about making sure that people can thrive in “good jobs” in the aftermath of economic transition. As her argument shows, doing “good work” most often involves multiple factors and considerations, and is rarely easy (link here).

Announcing The Good Project Fundamental Lessons

We are excited to announce The Good Project Fundamental Lessons, which can be found on our website here. 

This set of 16 lessons organized into 4 units serves as an introduction to the core concepts of The Good Project. Adapted from our longer 45-minute lessons (here), each fundamental lesson is approximately 15-minutes long. They are designed for secondary school students but are adaptable to middle school, and some lessons may well work with younger audiences.

Similar to our longer curriculum, the Fundamental Lessons include introductory material to familiarize teachers with The Good Project’s approach and theory of change. Each individual lesson includes an overarching goal, lists the core concepts covered in the lesson, and indicates any prerequisite lessons. The lesson instructions are detailed and broken down into separate steps with recommended timing in order to help adhere to the 15-minute window. All necessary worksheets and reading materials are also included. 

While we wish all students had the opportunity to delve deeply into the ideas and frameworks related to “good work”, we realize classroom time is at a premium. Our hope is that this abbreviated curriculum sparks interest in both students and educators, and that it provides enough of an overview for students to begin to think about how they might view themselves as “good workers.”

We would like to thank The Argosy Foundation for providing the generous funding that made this work possible. The Good Project has also received significant support from The Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation, The Endeavour Foundation, and additional anonymous funders. 

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or want to connect as you implement these lessons with your students. We are available via our “contact us” page, which can be found here.

New Dilemmas Explore Life During the Pandemic, Misrepresenting the Truth, and Whistleblowing

by Danny Mucinskas

Every day, people face situations in which the “right” course of action is unclear. These dilemmas may involve competing priorities, conflicts between the personal and professional, and clashes between excellence, ethics, and engagement at work.

Our dilemmas database (link here) includes dozens of narratives, inspired by real-life events, that have been used in classrooms and other learning environments to illustrate the principles of “good work” and to help prepare students to make sometimes difficult decisions.

We have added a new set of seven dilemmas to our expanding collection. Responding to current social issues and events, the stories represented in this batch are focused on life during the COVID-19 pandemic, questioning the boundaries of truth and lies, and whistleblowing in a case of racial inequity.

Click on the titles below to read the new additions. We encourage you to consider these dilemmas with students or colleagues and to use the reflection questions at the end to guide your discussions.

• Speaking Up, or Staying Silent? - A college student observes a roommate who is a close friend cheating during an online test.

• Confronting Coworkers - A marketing professional accidentally finds out that her coworkers have been disparaging her appearance during a virtual team meeting.

• To Tell, or Not to Tell? When Friends Break Rules - A college student feels increasingly uncomfortable with the way his friends are disregarding their school’s COVID-19 precautions.

• Test Inequity: When to Blow the Whistle? - A nonprofit employee, fed up with the way her colleagues have ignored racial bias in one of the organization’s products, weighs whether to go public.

• Marketing Misrepresentation - A woman overhears her boyfriend lying about his credentials in order to persuade clients to subscribe to a service.

• An Appropriation of Identity - A transplant to a new city finds out that her new friend has been lying about her race in representing her online business.

• Travel During COVID: Personal vs. Professional Safety - An inspector must decide whether to comply with her company’s request that she travel during the height of the pandemic. 

As always, the stories represented in these new dilemmas are based on real-life experiences and difficult decisions. We are still actively seeking new stories. If you have faced an ethical dilemma in school or work please consider sharing your story anonymously (link here).

Doing Good Work at School in the Midst of the Pandemic

A guest post by Hiya Jain

Hiya Jain is a recent graduate of the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India. We invited Hiya to write a post about her experience at Riverside during the COVID-19 pandemic and the social good that was still possible during this year. Below, she describes how her understanding of “good work” evolved this year as a result of two programs:

1. The Inner Sanitation Experience (INSANE), in which graduating students engage in self-discovery and personal transformation during a two-day community. Held just two weeks before final exams, students share perspectives about how they are not meant to “compete” with each other but to “complete” each other.

2. Persistence, a community service program in which students partake in initiatives in the local community.

We thank Kiran Sethi, founder of The Riverside School and Design for Change, for connecting us with Hiya and for the opportunity to feature a student’s personal point of view.

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I am Hiya Jain, a 17-year-old recent high-school graduate from India who wants to pursue Media, Politics, and Economics at an institution abroad later this year. After spending close to 15 years as a student at the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, where I was asked to take responsibility for my own education and allowed to make and learn from my mistakes, I am excited, not afraid, to see what the world has in store for me.  

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the single most difficult thing about lockdown was “perspective,” or rather the lack of it. Sitting in the comfort of my own home, I was almost completely cut off from social interaction, save for Zoom calls. This made my outlook on the world very one-dimensional. In essence, I was only speaking with people who had the privilege of owning an electronic device and had a steady Internet connection. This meant that while I heard of the disparities created by the pandemic, and I saw news reports of an extensive crisis so many people faced, it became so much easier to compartmentalize them away.

Add to the situation the perceived struggles of coping with online school and the many other comparatively insignificant problems of a senior year in lockdown, and doing “good work” became an afterthought. But at the end of the day, “good work” is a choice, as is making the “right decision,” and sometimes even the most well-intentioned people need a reminder of that. Thankfully, I experienced two particular processes at Riverside that served as a reminder for me to do “good work” in the world and that gave me much needed perspective.

First, there was INSANE (link here), an experience that truly lives up to its name. Two weeks before our final senior secondary leaving examinations, my entire class spent a day going through six carefully planned activities for the sole purpose of setting priorities before we graduated. The day started at about 6AM with a bunch of sleep deprived individuals, but by the end, we were more awake and aware than we had ever been. We spent time at a cemetery, picked up trash on the roads, rolled incense sticks, and reflected over our inability to convey the magnitude of our problems to others in the world.

Even with the challenges posed by the pandemic, even if we only got a modified version of the true “inner sanitation” experience, it was still worth it. Why? Because each one of us left asking so many questions, including, “What is stopping us from doing good work?”

The second process, one we undertook for the duration of the year, is called “Persistence.” The name is again fitting because it is something every student participates in during the entirety of high school at Riverside. In the simplest of terms, Persistence is student-driven community service. It can take lots of different forms, but the one that I lead was called “Inclusion,” an attempt to help students under the Right to Education Act reach their target class level academically.  

This was the first time I saw opportunity inequality during the pandemic. Each week, as my student buddy and I struggled through another session with poor technology connection, I realized the importance of the Internet in learning. Despite the challenges, she showed up every class ready to make it work, and I knew I had to at least attempt to match her efforts in doing my best “good work.” 

So, what does “good work” mean? Personally, I find it very difficult to explain or define it because I think that “good work” is often just the result of being a “good person.” And as I reflect on the processes I just described, it is clearer to me that the objective of both Persistence and INSANE was to help us become better people. INSANE showed us the purpose of making morally sound choices, while Persistence illustrated how our actions affect others, thus demanding quality “good work” from us.

In a funny and clichéd way, while I set out to write about learning during the pandemic, I think it turned out to be more like learning from the pandemic. I understand that “good work” is a choice, which seems more obvious and achievable when the little bit of empathy and whole lot of perspective I learned at Riverside.