Children of Mixed Couples in the Postdigital Age: When Digital and Intercultural Competences Come Together

This study is situated within the Postdigital Intercultures, that is a field of research in which the challenge of living together, education for citizenship, and social relations both among individuals and of individuals with societies and their structures, are studied in relation to the everyday intertwining of socio-cultural heterogeneity/complexity and a plurality of languages and environments that are connected to postdigital transformations (Pasta, Zoletto, 2023; Jandric et al., 2023). Beginning with the concept of “digital educational poverty” (Marangi, Rivoltella, Pasta, 2022; 2023), the study reflects on digital skills and differences based on socioeconomic factors using the Depend tool (Digital Educational Poverty in Educative Networking and Development). This tool was developed by the Research Center on Media, Innovation and Technology Education (Cremit) of the Catholic University and tested in the Digital Connections project (2021-2024), involving 99 schools integrating the fight against digital educational poverty into the civic education curriculum for the second and third year of middle school. The concept of digital educational poverty results from the hybridization of two perspectives in defining digital competence (Pasta, Marangi, Rivoltella, 2021): the “rights” perspective (Digital Competences 2.1 and 2.2) and that of “New Literacies” (Rivoltella, 2020), which focuses on the dynamism and transdisciplinarity of competencies (Buckingham, 2020) and the concept of Dynamic Literacies (Potter, McDougall, 2017). Depend calculates the Digital Competence Score (PCD) with 12 indicators related to four learning dimensions: understanding (technical knowledge; rules; filtering data, information, and digital content), being (digital creativity; narrative skills; protecting digital identity), living together (netiquette and cyberstupidity; algorithmic logics; collaborative knowledge), and for an autonomous and active life (citizenship: using the web for good causes; sharing information; critical thinking). Through the survey of the Digital Competence Score (PCD) submitted to 6,415 respondents in 2022-23, it emerges that the results of children of mixed couples surpass those of children with both parents born abroad and those with both parents born in Italy. From this perspective, the article focuses on the children of mixed couples, providing a socio-cultural snapshot with attention to technological uses, and theorizes the elements of mutual enrichment between digital and intercultural competences (Granata, 2011; 2015). Dynamism, the need for contextualization, and the collective component are the three elements that, within the framework of “Onlife Citizenship” (Pasta, Rivoltella, 2022), unite digital and intercultural competences, approached also, in the sense of Bourdieu’s cultural capital, by a declination that considers the variables that intervene to co-determine situations and strives not to apply linear and deterministic models for assessing competences.