What a Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge Taught Me About Digital Literacy Education
We didn’t open a single laptop. There were no slides, no worksheets, no lesson plan printed in triplicate. There was just a Thursday during Spring Break, a Girl Scout troop, and about four miles of Brooklyn, from the Transit Museum to the Promenade to the span of the Brooklyn Bridge itself, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, the most honest conversation about digital literacy I’ve had all year. It came from the girls. I just had to get out of the way.
The Conditions Were the Curriculum
Here’s what I’ve learned after years of teaching digital literacy in schools across New York City: you cannot have a real conversation about a child’s relationship with technology while they are holding their technology. The device becomes a shield, a distraction, or a performance, and the moment it disappears, so does the performance.
On this walk, no one was on a device. No one had to be reminded, redirected, or peeled away from a screen. We were moving through the world, physically and together, and that created three conditions I rarely get to engineer in a classroom setting.
Devices Were Down
Not confiscated, not banned, simply unnecessary because we were too busy actually looking at things. The world around us was doing the work.
Guards Were Down
There is something about side-by-side movement, about not sitting across from an adult who is evaluating you, that loosens kids up in ways that a classroom rarely allows. These girls talked freely and at length, following their own curiosity rather than a prompt.
The Peer Dynamic Was Working for Me
In a classroom I’m often navigating social anxiety, performance pressure, and the invisible hierarchies that make kids careful about what they say. On this walk, the group was a resource. One girl’s candor gave the next girl permission to be candid too.
What resulted wasn’t a lesson in the traditional sense. It was a window into how these girls actually think about their digital lives, and what I saw through it gave me a lot of hope.
What the Girls Actually Said
Somewhere between the Promenade and the Bridge, we started talking about where they spend their time online. One girl told me, plainly and with genuine pride, that she only talks to her friends and fellow troop members on Roblox. She wasn’t confessing or apologizing. She was explaining her system, the boundaries she had already internalized around who gets access to her online social world, and she wanted me to know that she had thought about it.
“She wasn’t confessing. She was explaining her system — the boundaries she’d already built around who gets access to her online world.”
I was proud of her, because that is exactly the kind of conscious, intentional digital behavior I spend my career trying to cultivate. It doesn’t always come from a lesson. Sometimes it comes from a child who has absorbed the right messages from the adults around her and quietly built her own framework.
Then another girl looked at me and asked why I don’t allow my own daughter on Roblox.
It was a fair question, and a good one, and the fact that she felt safe enough to ask it told me more about what these girls are capable of than any assessment ever could. We talked about it honestly: platform design, age-appropriateness, the difference between supervised and unsupervised access, and the reality that reasonable people can look at the same platform and land in different places. Nobody left the conversation with a verdict. They left it with more to think about, which is the whole point.
That is digital literacy education in its most alive form. Not a worksheet, not a cautionary video, but a real, reciprocal exchange between young people who are already thinking critically and an adult who takes their thinking seriously.
The Bridge Is Not an Accident
I want to linger for a moment on the Brooklyn Bridge, because I don’t think the metaphor is accidental. Infrastructure doesn’t happen by itself. Someone decided that connection between two places mattered enough to build something lasting, something designed to hold weight over time and through stress. If you’ve ever looked closely at the bridge’s cables, you know that the tension holding everything together isn’t hidden or smoothed over. It’s visible by design, because the bridge works because of that tension, not in spite of it.
Digital literacy education works the same way. It is not a one-time assembly, a single classroom visit, or a module tucked into a media studies elective. It is something that has to be built deliberately, maintained consistently, and supported from multiple points at once, including schools, families, community organizations, and the villages that surround children in all the hours that fall outside the school day. Walking across that bridge with my Brownie troop, I kept thinking about how much that looked like the village doing its job.
What I Actually Learned
People say that kids are sponges, and they are, but I want to be more precise about what that means in practice. They are not just absorbing what we teach them explicitly. They are absorbing what we model, what we allow, and what we choose not to address. The girl who had developed her own boundaries around Roblox didn’t learn that in a classroom. She learned it somewhere, from someone, through the accumulated experience of being around adults who took this seriously enough to talk about it out loud.
That is the real argument for digital literacy as a life skill, not only because children face genuine risks online, but because conscious, intentional engagement with technology is a capacity that has to be built through practice. It develops through repetition, through trusted relationships, and through exactly the kind of conversation that opens up when you take a group of girls for a walk and ask them what they actually think.
The Village Has to Show Up
Schools cannot do this alone, and I say that as someone who works in schools, believes in schools, and has seen what becomes possible when a principal decides digital literacy is a real priority and carves out real space for it. But the work doesn’t end at dismissal, and it can’t. The village, meaning the coaches, troop leaders, aunties, neighbors, and adults who show up on Saturdays, is not a supplement to this education. It is the reinforcement without which the education doesn’t stick.
If you are an educator or school leader thinking about what a comprehensive digital literacy program actually looks like, I’d invite you to sit with this: the most substantive conversation I facilitated this year didn’t happen in a classroom. It happened on a bridge, at eye level, between girls who trusted each other and an adult who asked real questions and expected real answers. That is replicable. It is scalable. And it starts with deciding that this work is worth doing everywhere, not just during school hours.
Schnelle is a digital literacy educator, content creator, and Girl Scout Brownie troop leader in Brooklyn, NY. She has worked with schools across New York City helping students engage consciously and critically with technology. BAM Digital Media is NYC-based, MWBE-certified, and built on 14+ years of real-world content experience.
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