Today, reading is embedded in digital media offerings and devices. Being able to use these offerings competently requires reading skills. International performance studies for pupils such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD's) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMS), and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), both directed at the Lynch School of Education in Boston College, show international desiderata here. Not only do gender-specific differences manifest, but above all, the socially-determined, educational gap is widening. Although children from educationally aspirational families can more easily compensate for social disadvantages, the social context has a fundamental cultural and economic impact on motivation, participation, and opportunities for educational success. Poor readers can access and understand media content less and struggle with writing, digital communication, and assessing more complex contexts more (Vercellotti and Matto 2016). Global political orientation is directly linked to reading and media skills (Thoman and Jolls 2004). Whether for socially responsible action during the pandemic, diversity, or serious source selection when searching for information or reflective political opinion-forming, reading and media skills always have a social and ethical perspective. In this respect, we see them as crosscutting or critical skills. Convergent media development (Jenkins 2009) as part of “mediatization” (Krotz 2007) requires a broader, interdisciplinary promotion of digital use in technology, content use, and evaluation (Marci-Boehncke et al. 2022). That applies first and foremost to higher education, where teachers are trained. As we will show below, this assessment is particularly appropriate for German teachers. However, the challenge of teaching media literacy in the digital age is also relevant for other nations, as international studies (Fraillon et al. 2014; Schilder et al. 2016; Fraillon et al. 2019; Polanco-Levicán and Salvo-Garrido 2022; Frau-Meigs 2023) and specific studies, for example from Europe (Drotner 2020; Lessenski 2021; OECD 2023a, 2023b; Schmitz et al. 2024) and the USA (Bulger and Davidson 2018) show. This challenge has direct consequences for teacher training: “Enhancing MIL Media and Information Literacy among students requires that teachers themselves become media and information literate” (Wilson et al. 2011, 17). Our project, which we present here, aims to address precisely this challenge in university teaching. The shift from on-site teaching to digital teaching, which can be accessed individually from anywhere, implements the objective of this challenge. Those who are to become digitally and medially literate learn this directly in the learning process itself. At the same time, digital access enables cross-location teaching, both nationally and internationally. The “digital space” we describe here overcomes the boundaries of spatially direct teaching. This setting imparts the “21st Century Skills” (Trilling and Fadel 2012; P21 2019) to future teachers as multipliers of comprehensive media literacy (Marci-Boehncke et al. 2023), as these skills are essential for all modern societies and education systems. In addition, this concept of digital teaching meets the ethical requirements of providing inclusive and nondiscriminatory access to teaching opportunities for people according to their abilities and limitations (Rath et al. 2021). The ever-emerging demand in education policy for a reorientation of skills towards more communication, future orientation, critical thinking, and collaboration—as formulated above all in the “21st Century Skills” (Trilling and Fadel 2012; P21 2019)—should have consequences for the design of school and university teaching/learning situations. Only the next generation of teachers will be able to change how skills are taught in a future-oriented way. However, university teacher training has relied on individual work, individual examinations, the reproduction of existing positions, traditional knowledge, and (despite the discourse), the recognition and dominance of the content knowledge taught by the teaching professions. The central media of university teaching were printed materials. The pessimistic assessment by Clinton et al. 2013, 9) has, therefore, lost none of its relevance, especially in Germany and concerning media education and digital literacy: “The skills, practices, and dispositions students are encouraged to develop are filtered through a system designed for an outdated world.” This justified complaint is rooted in the media-skeptical beliefs of prospective student teachers (Pajares 1992; Petko 2012; Admiraal et al. 2017). Studies conducted over several years have shown that, at least in Germany, prospective teachers at universities, especially in the humanities, have already brought this skepticism with them from their school biography and arrive at university with it (Schmid et al. 2017; Marci-Boehncke and Delere 2018; Rath and Delere 2020). In addition, they continue to be taught media skepticism for the most part (Gretter and Yadav 2018). The result is a media-hostile and anti-digital “media-educational habitus” (Friedrich 2015), which has been identified in international and national studies for years (Fraillon et al. 2014; Fraillon et al. 2019) and has also been criticized from a professional ethics perspective (Marci-Boehncke and Rath 2019). Despite the digital challenges of the COVID-19 years, this finding has remained the same in the current PISA study 2022 (OECD 2023a, 2023b). Although the COVID-19 pandemic has forced digital teaching in the classroom, this practice has not been sustainable. Regarding other OECD countries, the willingness of German teachers to use digital media in the classroom is still well-below the OECD average in 2022 (Lewalter et al. 2023, 268). It can be assumed that the imperative of the COVID-19 pandemic to offer digital teaching in schools and universities was met with largely unprepared teachers (Blume 2020). However, digital skills are the foundation of “21st Century Skills” (Trilling and Fadel 2012), which include communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and innovation. The subcutaneously influential media-skeptical beliefs (Dede 2010) make educational system changes difficult. Other teaching paradigms also emphasize the need to use and teach digital skills actively. Examples include the United Nations' “17 Sustainable Development Goals” (SDG) and constructivist approaches such as inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, and problem-based learning, as well as considerations on teacher professionalization—such as the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) model (Mishra and Koehler 2006; Petko 2012) and the expanded concept of ITPACK Marci-Boehncke 2018, which enhances TPACK with the aspects of inclusion and mediatization. These orientations speak for multidimensional and digitalized teaching/learning situations. Digital skills and digital thinking are therefore required of teachers nationally and internationally. As already laid out in the “European framework for the digital competence of educators” (DigCompEdu) (Redecker 2017), this international demand has not yet been sufficiently implemented, especially in Germany. In addition to technical and curricular foundations and didactic design options, teachers increasingly need a culture of metacognitive reflection that includes their expectations and beliefs. To this end, experiences must first be strengthened so that digitality can be defined as a desirable framework for action and technical self-efficacy in its use can also be gained by teachers. Peer-supported learning opportunities that promote such development processes promise more realization because they are perceived as less authoritarian. Therefore, education needs settings in which content, working methods, and opportunities to reflect on the new skills are taught, practiced, and reflected upon in equal measure. The increasingly streamlined university curricula in the BA and MA teacher training courses since the Bologna Process (EACEA 2020) require new, timely, more efficient, and digitalized teaching/learning concepts. The individual skills, some of which are in different domains (from educational science, national language subjects, information and communications technology (ICT), as well as political and ethical education) cannot be acquired in individual seminars but require a networked and application-oriented learning setting. However, this transcends subject boundaries and is, therefore, itself in a gray area of university subject teaching. The teaching situation of the COVID-19 semesters from 2019 to 2021 has offered these opportunities to try out digital work and examination situations that previously seemed impossible, also due to legal concerns. Here, we present an example that combines the subjects of German and ethics in a single seminar in teacher training, explicitly incorporating media education, curricular framing, inclusion, and future orientation and challenging the learners' metacognitive skills. In addition, the joint work in the seminar can also be understood as at least a short-term Professional Learning Community (PLC) (Vescio and Adams 2015), as lecturers from the universities cooperate across university and subject boundaries at eye level with Master's students from both locations to create a platform for future Bachelor's student cohorts jointly. In order to develop professional digital skills, we have made a virtue of necessity and used the necessary digitalization of teaching under COVID-19 as a practical field for teaching digital literacy to students and, thus, to future pupils. Before describing the entire seminar concept below, we will briefly examine a specific form of participation in the online seminar. Teaching always has a specific spatial design. That also applies to digital teaching, although our self-conception of spatial presence seems to be suspended. (We have developed this in detail elsewhere regarding spatial theory Marci-Boehncke and Rath 2022). Over several semesters, digital participation in courses in virtual spaces was experienced as alienation and anonymization of everyday university life, not only by students of the humanities, but also by students of other disciplines. Analog social contacts and conversations were replaced by a silent togetherness “at a monitor with black tiles” (Bruns and Rademacher 2020) in the Zoom room. Therefore, the room design was a central condition for the success of our concept. The black tiles of the online platforms result from a “constant presence of each other's absence” (Sherbersky et al. 2021, 355). Analog space is defined by a physical and a social dimension (Lefèbre 1991). However, both dimensions are eliminated or at least limited to digital face-to-face teaching via online communication platforms. As teachers, we wanted to clarify in practice that digitality is not another world, but that we only live and act in one world, that digital space is part of it and can also be entered and shaped. Defining spaces and positioning oneself in spaces are constructive “acts of producing space” (Löw 2008, 46), and these require social practice. As a practical implementation of this position, we will present a cross-university, cross-country, and cross-disciplinary didactic setting that challenges and supports students regarding their future didactic requirements as teachers. To this end, students at the universities of Dortmund and Ludwigsburg developed digital learning units on school-relevant topics of media education in cooperative PLGs (Vescio and Adams 2015). These are then made available to other students in younger semesters through digital online MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) as peer-to-peer learning opportunities. In this way, both academic and media-didactic skills and, finally, the “21st Century Skills” (Trilling and Fadel 2012) and the ITPACK concept (Marci-Boehncke 2018) are realized in the form of content-related and methodological work and reflection requirements. These two concepts are analyzed in more detail below regarding their significance for teacher training courses. The evaluations, which have been available since the summer term of 2022 at both universities, show that students rate the content orientation as highly relevant and, at the same time, recognize their own educational needs (digital literacy and media literacy) in practice. The shift towards the practical implementation of digitalization thus represents a work-organizational “disruption” in the students' habitus. With this term, we refer to the theory of “disruptive innovation” (Christensen 1997; Christensen and Eyring 2011) with a concept of technology-driven disruption. This theory has proven fruitful when applied to education (see the overview in Flavin 2012). However, Flavin also the is not an of the technology, through with this In this the concept here in the practice of university learning to change the future practice of school teaching. in subjects see in digitalization students on other courses (Schmid et al. and still work less with digital media in Germany to other (Fraillon et al. Fraillon et al. 2019; et al. 2019). are also more the of digital for learning, participation, and (Fraillon et al. their from other countries, such as wanted to this finding with our concept. 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Marci‐Boehncke et al. (Thu,) studied this question.