Harnessing digital community mapping for the development of primary and secondary students’ civic competences: a case study

In this study, we examine a pedagogical activity centered around the collaborative construction of a digital community map, involving students from 4th to 7th grade. Our primary focus is to explore how engaging students in meaningful activities related to their local environment can facilitate the development of civic and social competences. Furthermore, we propose a methodology for analyzing the digital artifacts created by students, with the goal of examining the connection between the discursive actions carried out through the artifacts and different types of social and civic competences. The analysis enables us to discuss four distinct categories of artifacts: Task-oriented, Reflexive/descriptive, Critical/problematizing, and Transformative/agentic. Each category encompasses artifacts that embody a specific set of discursive actions and corresponds to different competences. We claim that identifying the discursive actions that the students perform by means of the artifacts can help teachers to assess the students’ competences during this type of pedagogical activities.