Dr Huw Davies and Dr Callum McGregor have received an ESRC Impact Acceleration Award for the project 'Embedding research-informed political and digital literacy in Scottish education'.
Research shows that because young people mainly encounter politics through digital social media, digital and political literacy should be addressed simultaneously. For example, social media ‘influencers’ with young audiences and millions of followers are often a source of racism, misogyny, conspiracy theories, and disinformation campaigns.
This project will help equip teachers and young learners across Scotland with the capacity to identify and critically evaluate the ideologies and manipulation techniques that these influencers and campaigns use as well as the digital platforms that enable them.
We will work with Education Scotland’s curriculum area leads, as well as Directors for Education in Scotland’s local authorities to identify school leaders and teachers from relevant subject areas who will participate in a series of stakeholder workshops. The purpose of these workshops is to better understand the issues and challenges as experienced on the ground in diverse practice settings, disseminate our research, and subsequently, in dialogue with all stakeholders, co-produce Education Scotland’s new digital and political literacy frameworks.