‘Maddie is Online’: A Creative Learning Path to Digital Literacy for Young People

This paper explores young people’s development of digital literacy and resilience and discusses how teachers and librarians can play an important role in supporting young people to become digital citizens: informed, active, ethical, safe and responsible members of the online society. The research involved the delivery and evaluation of an interactive educational workshops that included an online cartoon series, accompanied by openly available educational toolkits dealing with topics of online resilience and safety in the online environment. The research involved a total of 239 secondary school pupils, across six schools and within a single local authority in Scotland. Anonymous qualitative and quantitative data were collected from the learning activities, which related to young people’s experiences, coping strategies and emotions in the online environment. The workshops empowered young people to open dialogue about challenging situations they experience in their everyday online connectivity and express their needs for further training. This work presents an innovative constructivist learning approach that can be replicated with young people to explore multiple challenges and opportunities they may encounter when navigating their online environment.