Co-Creating Digital Resilience: An Intergenerational Pedagogical Framework for School-Community Literacy in Europe

Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on New Trends in Teaching and Education

Year: 2026

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Co-Creating Digital Resilience: An Intergenerational Pedagogical Framework for School-Community Literacy in Europe

Elena Xeni

ABSTRACT:

In the wake of post-pandemic technological transformation, cultivating digital well-being and achieving demographic equity have become central mandates for European educational policy. Despite high digital access, primary and secondary school students frequently manifest an internal boundary vacuum, resulting in excessive screen time, screen dependency, and emotional dysregulation. Concurrently, senior adult populations face critical digital exclusion due to the systemic, rapid digitization of public infrastructure, municipal utilities, and everyday communication portals.
To systematically address these interconnected sociological crises, this paper outlines the comprehensive Digital Harmony Project (Project ID: 101195789) pedagogical architecture. Moving away from traditional, one-way top-down instructional mechanisms, the Digital Harmony intervention introduces a dialectical, reciprocal intergenerational exchange model. Within this dual-action ecosystem, young students leverage their intuitive, functional software familiarity to tutor senior adults in basic smartphone operations, notification management, and creative online design. Simultaneously, older adults utilize their accumulated life experience, emotional stability, and perspective to coach young learners in critical boundary setting and emotional regulation when navigating volatile online spaces.
This paper consolidates the project’s six foundational implementation didactical pillars (Mutuality, Co-Creation, Universal Design for Learning, Structured Interaction, Reflective Practice, and Ethical Governance) , synthesizes the cross-national datasets across eight European member states, and presents the operational instructional matrices for the nine comprehensive curriculum modules. Ultimately, this framework models an adaptable blueprint for embedding long-term, multi-generational digital citizenship, social inclusion, and psychological safety directly within formal school and community systems throughout the European Union.

Keywords: Digital harmony and well-being, Intergenerational learning, Social inclusion, Digital resilience, Educational policy