Zara returns: Teaching children digital rights
How do you explain data privacy to a nine-year-old? You could try a lecture on GDPR — good luck. Or you could tell a story about Zara, a girl who discovers a glowing digital realm where wonders and dangers live side by side, and who learns — adventure by adventure — that she has rights there too. That is the idea behind "Zara & the Glowing Realm," the storybook at the heart of the third and final FutureEd guide: our Digital Rights Awareness Guide. See the result here: link to the last version of our book.
Why digital rights need a story
When we asked teenagers in our FutureEd focus group about digital rights, one theme dominated: privacy. They knew their school platforms could read their messages; they knew screens could be mirrored and monitored; they wondered where protection ends and surveillance begins. If teenagers are only just finding the words for this, younger children have none at all — and they are online earlier every year. The Digital Rights Awareness Guide gives children, and the adults around them, a shared vocabulary: what personal data is, what consent means, when monitoring is protection and when it crosses a line, and what a child can actually do when something online feels wrong.
A guide that grew from co-creation
True to how we work at CollectiveUP, Zara was not written in a closed room. We unveiled the first version of the storybook earlier this year and invited educators, parents and children to help shape it. You can check it out here.
That feedback is now flowing into the improved, publish-ready version arriving this August. The result is a resource that works in classrooms, libraries and living rooms alike: a story children want to hear again, wrapped around a curriculum adults can actually use.
Practical value for schools, parents and partners
For teachers, the guide turns an intimidating topic into ready-to-use lessons and conversation starters. For parents, it opens the digital-rights conversation without fearmongering. For schools and partner organisations, it slots into digital citizenship programmes, media literacy weeks and rights-centred education trajectories. And together with the other two FutureEd guides — ALLI asbl's legal and ethical framework and the EUDEC rights-centred education guide with best practices from democratic education — it completes a toolkit that takes a school from principles, to practice, to the digital frontier.
FutureEd month, complete — but the work is just starting
This post closes our August series on the three FutureEd guides. All three are being finalised for publication, shaped by legal experts, democratic educators and — most importantly — young people themselves. The guides exist to be used, and that is where you come in.
Want Zara in your classroom, or the full FutureEd toolkit in your organisation? We offer workshops, teacher training and co-creation programmes on digital rights and rights-centred education — and we are always open to building the next EU proposal with schools and organisations that share this mission. Tell us what you need: liliana.carrillo@collectiveup.be or info@collectiveup.be
FutureEd is an Erasmus+ (KA210) project co-funded by the European Union, developed with our partners ALLI asbl and EUDEC. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission.
#FutureEd #DigitalRights #ZaraAndTheGlowingRealm #MediaLiteracy #ChildrensRights #ErasmusPlus #CollectiveUP
