Elementary School Teacher Training for Digital Citizenship in the English Language Classroom

Theoretical Background

The author finds it important to state their research positionality. This study is set in one of the Ukrainian universities. With the introduction of lockdown due to Covid-19 and the switch to blended and hy-flex learning in Ukraine due to Russian unprovoked aggression, there is a rapid development of various areas of elementary school students’ digital competence. However, digital citizenship is an under-researched notion in Ukrainian scholarly discourse and the author wants to raise awareness of it among pre-service teachers. The search for the Ukrainian equivalent of the notion of digital citizenship (“цифрове громадянство”) in Google Scholar returns only around 14,400 results. As a result, the author studies the global experience of teaching pre-service teachers about global citizenship and attempts to bring this knowledge into Ukrainian teacher training discourse. At the same time, the results of this study have replicability potential in any setting and are not restricted to the Ukrainian pre-service teacher system and can be of interest to teacher trainers and pre-service elementary school teachers.