A Call for Digital Literacy Across the Curriculum

“Write a brief history of your relationship to digital technologies, including social media.”

This is a diagnostic prompt I have been giving students for a decade or so, first only in composition classes, now in most first-year classes that I teach. In addition to helping me learn how each student writes, I use this prompt to learn about students’ changing relationships to technology. It was in this way that I initially learned about Snapchat and streaks, or the fact that many of my students first opened social media accounts at a sleepover in elementary school, unbeknownst to their parents. Too many of them recall their first incident of being bullied—or of bullying—in a group text in middle school, and most tell me that they get their news from social media, especially Instagram and TikTok.

In the aftermath of this assignment, together we create a set of communal best practices for the use of technological devices in the classroom, taking differing needs and accommodations into account. The related conversations that follow, around new and emergent technologies, wind through entire semesters.

This is because the ways students are growing up, and their day-to day-lives, are changing at such a rapid clip that without such conversations to bridge us, we might as well be speaking to one another using smoke signals. Just as higher education once made the shift, however unevenly, to integrating writing practices and training across the curriculum—an effect largely of postwar shifts toward increased democratization and diversification of colleges—so too it’s time to make the case for digital literacy across the curriculum in higher education.

Librarians have already been doing this work, often unacknowledged, for years, but those of us in classrooms need to highlight the cause and collectively join forces. We need a set of principles developed by instructors from different disciplines and all kinds of institutions that can be integrated into professional development training nationwide and continually cultivated over time.

Many of the same basic tenets of what are known as Writing Across the Curriculum programs could be applied to this new realm, like the importance of self-reflection on behaviors and practices (what that opening writing prompt elicits), the emphasis on teaching the whole student (which means delving more deeply into how students are now spending so much of their time), and the attention to differing expectations and norms depending on discipline, genre and context—something that could effectively be applied to the intake, creation and dissemination of information and story in all kinds of online modalities.

It’s 2024, and the majority of U.S. teens own iPhones and are on social media daily, many self-reporting they use various platforms “almost constantly.” This is where most of the adult public, including the professoriate, also spends at least some of their time, to socialize, elicit or share opinions and information, and, just as often, air grievances. While conversations around technology and education have typically focused on legislation and top-down policies, often induced by panic, these are ultimately stopgap, inadequate solutions to a complete reshaping of the world as we know it. There continues to be little sustained, deliberate professional development or training for professors teaching students whose experiences of the world are increasingly tied to the digital spheres in which so much of their social, educational and professional lives take place.

In colleges across the country, these shifts started long before COVID. I have witnessed professors around me scrambling, often on their own, to figure out best practices for integrating digital tools into their classrooms, or teaching students appropriate ways to find, evaluate and use online sources. For example, is Wikipedia a suitable resource? Both students and the professors I train ask me this question nearly every semester. What makes matters so complicated is not only that context and use matters, but that the answer has changed over time. How should cellphone and other tech use be treated in the classroom? Ask 10 professors, get 10 different answers.

One of the central issues seems to be that professors themselves have little background or training in understanding the history and development, including the design and use, of various online platforms and technologies. Consequently, as with teaching writing, they may feel unequipped and fearful. (Consider, for example, the recent, and continued, widespread panic around ChatGPT.)

It’s no wonder: Technology is changing at a propulsive clip, and no individual besides those working in the tech industry—or, for that matter, those working in digital studies—could be well expected to keep up while continuing with their professional obligations. This is why we professors, with support from our administrations, need to band together and create a new movement, using the highly successful Writing Across the Curriculum movement as a model, to introduce Digital Literacy Across the Curriculum.

It’s not as though we need to start from scratch. The Stanford History Education Group, for example, created its Civic Online Reasoning curriculum in 2014. It has free resources for educators, in secondary schools and beyond, invested in teaching students to diligently look for and evaluate all kinds of online sources. A colleague recently told me about Courageous RI, a media literacy program run by the University of Rhode Island and the Media Education Lab. These are just two of many programs, which have often been independently created as a reaction to the current crisis around using and understanding technology in education.

Most educators well know the problems such an integrative curriculum would be responding to: Things like the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation, an already urgent issue set to magnify with the integration of more artificial intelligence models; an alarming mental health crisis; and, perhaps least often highlighted and most difficult to address, a general lack of awareness and reflection on where and how digital technologies and tools might best fit into our lives.

The effects of technology are not foregone conclusions. Instead, technology consists of tools that can be shaped to work for the missions many higher education institutions have long set for themselves. We just have to be more intentional about making those connections.

Professors should not be expected to face every new shift in technology—small revolutions within a major revolution—on their own, particularly when so many are now working as contingent laborers and when most have experienced reduced resources and supports. These are not changes we can confront alone, and asking support service units across colleges and universities, like libraries and technology labs, to shoulder the burden is unfair and marginalizes the problem. We already have the WAC model we can look to as we similarly seek to integrate digital literacy across the curriculum: Let’s use it.