Growing up in the digital age faces new opportunities and challenges. It has also brought new research questions and stimulated new approaches and methodologies to understand and support children and youth growing up in the digital age. The two invited speakers shared with us their research in this area.

Prof. Ola Erstad, University of Oslo

In his research he is oriented towards studies of digital practices inside and outside of schools and issues of competence development for 21st century work and living, as well as studies of more fundamental educational issues concerning young people growing up today, with digital technologies as embedded parts of being human. In the first part he presented recent work on studying “learning lives” including research on learning identities, dropouts/pushouts, “future making” and teachers drawing on student’s “funds of knowledge”. In the second part he raised some issues about possibilities and challenges (conceptual, methodological and ethical) in current research on human development and wellbeing. This includes further studies of “learning lives” and notions of learning context, about transformative education and new models of education for the 21st century, and the concept of “lived citizenship”, as ways of studying trajectories of participation and social inclusion in communities, online and offline.

Prof. Halla Holmarsdottir, Oslo Metropolitan University

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent the latest global effort to address the plethora of challenges facing countries worldwide. Through a lifecycle lens approach, she acknowledged the importance of nurturing youth curiosity and creativity to stimulating capacity for innovation, from infancy and during early childhood and adolescent years. This is consistent with the approach adopted by the SDGs, which provide a more comprehensive vision for children and young people. Although youth have been to a large extent marginalized from development and decision-making processes historically, the importance of their participation and placing them at the centre of sustainable and inclusive development is now often highlighted in many national development strategies. The SDGs themselves are firmly anchored within a rights-based framework that reflect the commitments made for instance in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Harnessing the creativity, leadership, and social capital of youth is increasingly recognized as holding potential for the development of sustainable strategies to tackle some of the most pressing global challenges of our time.