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The U.S. Election Underscores the Need for Teaching News Literacy in Our Schools
By Liz Ramos
Nov 7, 2020
Imagine sending a teenage driver onto a highway in an unfamiliar area,
where road signs are in a foreign language, lanes change direction
without warning, fog and rain obscure visibility, the car has faulty
brakes, and the passengers are giving bad directions.
Madness, right?
It’s also madness to let teens wander an information highway strewn
with fabrications that obscure their path to credible information,
distractions that lead them astray and conditions that hinder their
ability to safely navigate an onslaught of misinformation.
The stakes of doing so are high, as we have seen with the flood of
misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice
protests—which literally puts our lives at risk and further inflames
and divides us.
Misinformation surged in the lead-up to the presidential election,
confusing and frustrating Americans and leaving many vulnerable to
voter suppression tactics. The spread of false, fabricated and
misleading content has only intensified in recent days as we await the
results, further dividing our nation.
This false information is intended to deceive and do harm. It is
particularly dangerous when disinformation comes not from foreign
adversaries trying to sway opinion but from within our government and
at the highest levels, as we are seeing now. It sows discord, inflames
tempers and fuels distrust in our democracy.
A disrupted return to school this fall has only complicated our ability
to teach our children how to protect themselves from the harm of
misinformation and disinformation. We cannot afford to delay in
providing young people with the ability and confidence to navigate our
complex information landscape. To truly thrive, they must be able to
discern fact from fiction, to distinguish news from opinion, and to
make smart decisions about what to believe, share and act on. And while
there is no driver training for the digital world, there is news
literacy education.
News literacy—the ability to determine what is credible and what is
not, to identify different types of information, and to use the
standards of authoritative, fact-based journalism as an aspirational
measure in determining what to trust—is a fundamental life skill, as
essential to success in the classroom and in life as reading or math.
Yet, news literacy is not universally taught, largely because of
systemic obstacles: It is not commonly part of curriculum standards,
districts tend to focus on standardized testing and STEM, and lessons
may be greatly limited or built around a textbook.
But these challenges are surmountable. If we want today’s students to
become critical thinkers and informed adults engaged in our democracy,
we need a mind shift when it comes to news literacy. We all must
realize that news literacy is essential—a key component to success in
college, in a career and in life.
When we, as educators, explore what news literacy education can
achieve, we discover that it enhances our teaching and our students’
learning, even if it is not specifically indicated in the guidelines
and practices stated above. I have seen this many times in my own
classroom, where I teach history and U.S. government to high school
students.
The critical thinking, research and digital discernment abilities news
literacy imparts have broad and meaningful applications. For example,
standardized testing, including the SAT and ACT, requires students to
analyze texts and answer questions to gauge their understanding—skills
that are intrinsic to becoming more news-literate. And, news literacy
education equips students to track down credible sources, conduct
meaningful research and confidently judge the reliability of
information they encounter.
Once they have these skills, they will exercise them when casting a
critical eye on events covered and issues discussed in history class,
successfully stating their case in a term paper or exploring evidence
of climate change for a science project.
When it comes to teaching news literacy with such a comprehensive
approach, we can look to Finland. The Nordic country ranks at the top
of European nations in resilience against misinformation.
An article in The Guardian earlier this year describes how Finland
begins teaching information literacy in grade school, seamlessly
integrating it across subjects. In math class, students learn how
statistics can be used to distort. In art class, they see how an
image’s meaning can be manipulated. In history, they examine
propaganda, and in Finnish language classes, students learn how words
can be used to confuse, mislead and deceive.
The results are clear: Finland leads Europe in successfully resisting
misinformation and consistently ranks among the top 10 most-educated
countries.
The U.S. must improve how it prepares students to be savvy information
consumers and civically engaged adults. The implications are life-long.
To this end, the nonprofit Media Literacy Now has been working to
promote legislation establishing advisory councils within state
departments of education to ensure K-12 media literacy education is
offered. Washington is poised to lead the way with Senate Bill 5594,
which would establish a grant program to integrate media literacy into
English, social studies or health curriculums.
Regardless of state borders, U.S. educators must take advantage of
opportunities like those provided by the National Association for Media
Literacy Education and the News Literacy Project, the national
nonpartisan education nonprofit whose board I serve on, to help us
succeed.
For good reason, we carefully prepare teenagers to safely navigate busy
roads. Yet we do not prepare them to safely venture into the dizzying
information infrastructure they have inherited from us. Simply put, we
are doing this generation a grave disservice when we fail to teach news
literacy.
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