Equipping future Ethics teachers to navigate AI and Digital Trust

Digital ethics is often treated as a specialist topic; something for regulators, engineers, or policy experts to address after technologies have already reshaped daily life.

In schools, however, ethical questions emerge much earlier and much closer to home: when students rely on curated feeds without noticing how these shape what they see; when AI tools are introduced in classrooms before there is shared agreement about what “responsible use” looks like; and when privacy, persuasion, and misinformation become normal features of young people’s online environments.

Led by Dr Lucianne Zammit and Prof. Christian Colombo, and supported by a research team comprising Dr May Agius, Ms Christine Scholz Fenech, and Mr Roger Tirazona, the wE-THRIVE project, which is funded through a Malta Digital Innovation Authority Applied Research Grant (MARG), aims to deepen understanding of digital trust and AI ethics among students and teachers.

On Thursday, 8 January 2026, Dr Lucianne Zammit and Mr Roger Tirazona met with pre-service teachers of Ethics to introduce wE-THRIVE and explain its educational relevance. The aim was straightforward: to ensure that future Ethics educators understand what the project is doing, why it matters, and how it connects to the real challenges they will face in classrooms.

Rather than presenting digital ethics as a list of “dos and don’ts”, the session framed it as a form of reflection and judgement; one that helps students recognise when values are at stake and reason carefully in situations where there may not be a single correct answer. They also discussed how digital environments are often designed to be seamless and frictionless, while ethical thinking requires the opposite: pause, questioning, and the willingness to sit with uncertainty.

During the session, they explored:

• The project’s purpose and focus, including how it examines digital trust, responsibility, and the ethical dimensions of AI use in education.
• Why teacher voice matters, because the ethical questions that arise in schools are shaped by context: student diversity, classroom realities, curriculum pressures, and wider school culture.
• What ethical issues look like in practice, such as data privacy, automated recommendations, persuasive design, academic integrity, bias, and fairness in AI-supported decision-making.
• The importance of pedagogy, not only content: facilitating dialogue, handling disagreement respectfully, and supporting students to develop reasoned positions rather than rehearsed opinions.

The discussion element of the meeting was just as important as the overview. Pre-service teachers raised questions about boundaries, classroom expectations, and how to guide student thinking without becoming either overly alarmist or overly permissive about technology. These are precisely the tensions educators need support to navigate - because “digital ethics” is not an abstract add-on; it is becoming part of everyday teaching and learning.

As wE-THRIVE continues, educators at different stages of their careers will continue to be engaged. If we want young people to develop digital judgement, we need to invest in the teachers who will help them practise it consistently, thoughtfully, and in ways that make sense in real classrooms.