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123RF
The Hechinger Report
Future of Learning: Media literacy ‘vitally important’
By Javeria Salman
Feb 10, 2021
For years now, experts and advocates have been saying there’s an urgent
need for media literacy, and more specifically news literacy. That need
became increasingly clear in 2020, when fake news, misinformation and
disinformation was so widespread that it had consequences for
everything from the coronavirus pandemic to the presidential election.
A 2019 report from the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that
nearly all high schools students surveyed had “difficulty discerning
fact from fiction online” and 96 percent of students failed to question
the credibility of an unreliable website.
And it’s not just young people.
A Pew Research Center study revealed that a majority of adults can’t
differentiate between factual statements and expressions of opinion.
Online social media platforms have only made the problem worse. By
design, these platforms enable and encourage “the widespread
distribution of fake news,” according to a report from the Reboot
Foundation, a research and funding institution devoted to promoting
critical thinking.
What’s needed, according to experts, is a focus on media literacy
education in classrooms — starting as early as third or fourth grade.
“We have an obligation as educators to do this,” Peter Adams, senior
vice president of education at the News Literacy Project, said.
“Today’s information environment is tremendously exciting and there’s
all kinds of access, but there are really some enormous challenges and
pitfalls and hazards out there.”
More than one third of middle school students report rarely or never
having learned how to judge the reliability of information sources,
which is “really the fundamental of what media literacy is,” said Helen
Lee Bouygues, president of the Reboot Foundation, who is an expert on
misinformation and critical thinking.
What does the term media literacy mean? And how does news literacy fit into it?
Although views of what constitutes media literacy vary, a comprehensive
definition embraced by several literacy groups states it is “the
ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms
of communication.” In schools, teaching media literacy involves showing
students how “to apply critical thinking to media messages,” according
to Media Literacy Now. News literacy is a subset of the field, focused
on evaluating and understanding news media messages.
Promoting an understanding of what goes into good reporting helps
students “recognize and differentiate quality journalism from other
kinds of information,” said News Literacy’s Adams, but it also may
“position them as really nuanced and savvy critics” of the news they
consume.
Ultimately, though, the way to teach both types of media literacy is
quite similar, Bouygues said, and there are many different sources
available for teaching them. The issue, she said, isn’t that there
aren’t enough tools, it’s “just not common in the curriculum.”
Adams echoed that sentiment. “In some districts, English language arts
teachers have almost no flexibility to work in something like this and
in others they do,” he said, adding that social studies teachers have a
bit more opportunity and flexibility to integrate this literacy into
the classroom.
To teach media literacy, Bouygues said we need to go back to the
basics. First, children need to develop skills that allow them to
recognize what the source of content is, to assess the background of
the person writing the article or piece of information, and to
cross-check different pieces of information, instead of relying on a
single source.
The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan education nonprofit, was
created to help educators teach students how to navigate today’s
information landscape and to provide resources and professional
development programs for educators.
Once a year, the NLP hosts a free webinar series for educators, which
includes an overview of the field and sessions on topics like
misinformation, helping students develop fact checking and digital
verification skills and teaching about news media bias. Educators can
also sign up for the NLP’s weekly newsletter, featuring recent events
that are “news literacy significant” and real-world examples of
misinformation, with prompts on how to incorporate them into classroom
discussions.
Partnering with journalists to address media literacy could also help.
A recent Pew Research Center study found that a majority of Americans
believe news media have the “most responsibility” in reducing fake news
and misinformation.
Two of NLP’s most popular programs do just that. Checkology, a free
e-learning platform, is designed for students in grades 6-12 and
provides interactive lessons from journalists and media experts on how
to apply critical thinking skills and interpret and consume
information. The NewsLitCamp, which is designed for educators, also
relies on journalists. In the one-day program, a school partners with
local newsrooms to bring teachers, school librarians and media
specialists together with journalists to learn about issues such as
journalism standards and practices, news judgment and bias and the role
of social media.
Before pandemic restrictions kept them from venturing out, educators
would visit local newsrooms to receive a behind-the-scenes view of the
news reporting process directly from the journalists who cover their
communities. Adams said that although the camp has gone completely
virtual, both journalists and educators continue to participate. Last
week, NLP hosted a virtual camp for Illinois educators with five
Chicago news organizations.
Media or news literacy education shouldn’t be relegated to a drop-in
unit or a one-off lesson, warned Adams. Educators need to integrate it
into instruction throughout the school year, he said.
The NLM is not the only group to offer online tools to teachers. For
example, Media Literacy Now has compiled dozens of resources for
educators and parents. News-O-Matic, an online newspaper for kids, is
another option. In Chicago, educator Sara K. Ahmed created another
simple way to discuss news literacy in the classroom. On Jan. 6, Ahmed
tweeted out a lesson from her book “Being the Change” that teachers can
use to help students think critically about current news events.
That critical ability is especially needed for dealing with information
on social media platforms, said Reboot’s Bouygues. The algorithms on
all social media platforms, she said, are designed to create echo
chambers that play on our emotions; adults are seeing the consequences
of that in online election rhetoric. But, she said, “obviously for
children who don’t have media literacy training, this is even more
dangerous, because it’s a convenient and easy way for them to gather
information.”
Bouygues said remote learning provides a “silver lining,” in that it
could be an opportunity for educators “rethink” curriculum to
incorporate critical thinking skills and media literacy into the
content they are teaching online.
As new technologies and social media platforms emerge, Adams said it’s
vitally important to formally integrate this literacy training into the
curriculum.
“Students have a right to it,” he said. “Information is clearly the
basis for their civic agency and civic empowerment. If someone can
misinform you, they can hijack the power of your civic voice.”
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