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The proportion of teachers who say they consider digital risks when educating students do so by addressing various topics. This mainly concerns the protection of personal data and the privacy of students (89.2%) and the rights to an image (67.3%). This awareness is often linked to cyberbullying issues that regularly cause problems in schools (Stassin 2019). There is therefore a strong emphasis on ethical, legal and psychosocial risks.

We thus notice that some teachers clearly position themselves as legitimate and responsible for the digital literacy of students, without this being linked to their disciplinary affiliation. For example, an English teacher explains that he is involved in the prevention of certain technical and ethical risks by giving students tips on how to choose “strong passwords”, thus enabling them to better protect their privacy and data. Others address informational and cognitive risks during Internet searches:

I tell them “If you go on YouTube, don’t click endlessly on the videos on the right, run your search, watch the video that matches your search, then do another search...” (English teacher in a senior high school, age 37).

Among teachers who make daily and varied use of digital technology, their personal experience of the Web can foster pedagogical practices and give them a sense of confidence in helping students secure their informational environment and develop their digital skills. For example, this English teacher says she wants to train students in digital use:

I discovered computers quite young, I was 8 or 10 years old, so I am used to searching, trying, making mistakes, trying again. And as you develop mechanisms, you learn which symbols correspond to what, you find a particular way of doing something in a section or other of some kind of software. In contrast, I see my colleagues who are twice or three times my age sometimes and they find it much more difficult because they don’t have the culture of digital technology that I have been immersed in since I was a child (English teacher in a high school, 25 years old).

This same teacher shows a digital culture that has developed around the various issues related to digital uses. This culture leads her to consider the risks:

We can limit the use of social networks and control them well, but that doesn’t mean we’ll relay good information. So, I refer you to the fake news that we talk about so much at the moment, but it’s not just related to current events, we can relay completely false information of all kinds, we can be taken in by false ideas, we can even, without going so far, simply read content that is slightly false or politically biased… (English teacher in a high school, age 25).

This teacher is joined by a young high school biology teacher who believes that digital networks are also learning spaces and that young people are not necessarily aware of this:

So social networks, in my opinion, should not be banned but should be used correctly, […] there are also advantages to uh... Facebook, or Twitter, etc., in that you can monitor information and follow interesting pages. For example, in biology there are very interesting pages. There is the page of the Museum of Natural History which publishes articles, there are the museums of Bordeaux which publish articles, and also American sites. So why not, um, do interdisciplinary work with the English teachers? Explain to the students that ok there are funny things on Facebook but there are also sources of information that are reliable and that they can go and look for information on them and often it’s small articles that are not very complicated. And then when it comes to digital literacy, in my opinion it’s like all the other types of education, be it sex education, citizenship education, etc. It should be part of the core curriculum. It concerns all the teachers because at the end of the day, our role as teachers is to give students the keys so that they become responsible citizens. And, well, being responsible also means paying attention to what we do with digital technology, and so for me it’s something in the core curriculum that all teachers should strive to do, and they don’t necessarily do it, so it’s a shame (biology teacher in a senior high school, age 22).

These teachers seem to be informed by the media. They are not unaffected by the talk of risk, but they are not overwhelmed by emotions. Instead, they seek to better understand the risks so they can explain them to students. Thus, unlike those who prefer to stay away from all the threats that digital uses can evoke, others, like these teachers, consider that it is essential to address these issues with students and to help young people more generally:

I’m a teacher, so of course I like to help students and I can’t just leave them struggling, but also and above all because very often Facebook and the Internet and social networks are very impersonal spaces where people expose their happiness or their unhappiness without any real human impact in fact and uh… I don’t claim to change the Internet, but in any case I use the Internet in a human way and if I see that people are putting up alarmist or sexist, xenophobic, discriminatory messages in general, well, I act. I don’t let... I don’t let it go. I don’t remain indifferent (English teacher in a high school, age 25).

Considering her role as an educator, this teacher tells us that she is even involved in providing mediation and helping young people who are being harassed on social networks. She says that she has joined the association “Marion 13 ans pour toujours” and regularly participates in the exchanges that take place on Facebook. She explains that she sometimes offers her help when a teenager appears to be struggling:

It seemed a bit worrying so I sent her a Facebook message saying, I’m at this association, you can get in touch or you can reply to me and then I’ll redirect you somewhere else (English teacher in a high school, age 25).

In the panel of new teachers we interviewed, this category of teachers, who are very committed, is still largely in the minority. Thus, the information and training efforts seem insufficient to go beyond the vision of risks and turn it into a lever for educating students.