Even though research on digital citizenship has expanded considerably during the last decade (Öztürk, 2021), there is still a limited body of research on teacher education and digital citizenship, especially when it comes to pre-service teachers’ ideas of how to teach digital citizenship in primary school (Lauricella et al., 2020; Richardson et al., 2021; Öztürk, 2021). This paper therefore aims to contribute with research on teacher education and digital citizenship through exploring how pre-service teachers reflect upon and make didactic choices when designing digital citizenship education for primary school pupils, in the context of a university course centered on critical, safe, responsible, and creative use of digital media (Hobbs, 2011; Öztürk, 2021).

The paper uses philosophical, pedagogical, and didactical perspectives (Bergson 1907/2007; Sjöström & Tyson, 2022) to 1) define some challenges and opportunities in designing digital citizenship education in teacher education, and 2) perform a qualitative text-analysis of 50 student papers in which pre-service teachers designed and motivated project-based teaching promoting digital literacy within Swedish leisure-time centers (children aged 6-12 years).

Preliminary results point towards both challenges and opportunities specifically concerning taking into account children’s own meaning-making processes in the design of digital citizenship education. Results also show how a majority of the pre-service teachers included safe and responsible use of digital media in their project proposals and motivated their didactic choices based on children’s use of social media and their mediatized everyday lives. They constructed original learning activities in which, for instance, teachers and pupils jointly create TikTok videos and discuss what constitutes responsible online communication.

This paper is relevant to Nordic educational research as it advances both philosophical and didactical understanding of digital citizenship education in teacher education. The paper thereby contributes with knowledge on both practical and theoretical challenges and opportunities of digitalization and technologies in education.