By Javeria Salman
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.”
Send story ideas and news tips to salman@hechingerreport.org. Tweet at @JaveriaSal. Read high-quality news about innovation and inequality in education at The Hechinger Report. And, here’s a list of the latest news and trends in the future of learning.
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 The Shortlist |
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1. Teachers suffering from digital divide too. New findings from a survey of more than 1,900 teachers nationwide provides valuable insight into how the digital divide has impacted both students and teachers. Teachers were surveyed in early March 2020, just before the shift to remote learning, and again in late June 2020. In March, 77 percent of teachers reported they were very confident in using digital media services for teaching; in June the number dropped to 66 percent. Based on these findings, the study, conducted by GBH Education in partnership with PBS, concluded that teachers need greater professional development support and new instructional tools to help them during remote learning. Another key finding, confirming what has been reported elsewhere: The pandemic shift to remote learning “exacerbated inequities in digital media access.” Teachers in public schools in urban and rural areas and in Title I schools were more likely than their peers in private schools and suburban public schools to report that a majority of their students lacked access to a device and/or high-speed internet to complete school work.
2. Teaching students about economic inequalities. A new initiative launched by The Opportunity Agenda, a social justice nonprofit, and Amplifier, a nonprofit design lab, aims to bring discussions about economic inequality and systemic racism into high school classrooms. The initiative includes a discussion guide, lesson plans designed for remote learning and art pieces to help instructors and parents talk to students about topics such as poverty, economic justice, access to resources and the wage gap. The lesson plans are being distributed to 15,000 teachers across the country, and are meant to “incorporate life lessons into academic materials,” according to statement from The Opportunity Agenda.
3. Funding to help districts address growing cybersecurity concerns. In light of a December warning issued by the FBI that almost 60 percent of reported ransomware incidents in August and September last year involved K-12 schools, IBM announced it is launching a $3 million Education Security Grant to help public school districts prepare for growing cybersecurity attacks. The grant is in response to an IBM-sponsored study from October 2020, which revealed that more than half of educators and administrators had not received even basic cybersecurity training. Five school districts will be awarded the in-kind grants, each valued at $500,000. School districts have until March 1 to apply.
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