Media Literacy Week Highlights Importance of Healthy News Diets

by Shawn P. Healy, PhD, Democracy Program Director

A modern definition of informed and engaged citizenship includes media and news literacy. I write today in honor of Media Literacy Week, sponsored by our partners at the National Association of Media Literacy Education (NAMLE). NAMLE hosted its conference in Chicago last summer, and the McCormick Foundation is proud to support and collaborate with a number of its members, including the News Literacy Project and the Center for News Literacy.

Like civic learning, media literacy must live across the curriculum. When I began my teaching career two decades ago, the daily newspaper served as my textbook. Media diets have since evolved, but the currency of news for democratic discourse and participation has only appreciated. While our students are indeed digital natives and often more adept than us with their devices, it is wrong to asssume that they possess the skills and dispositions to be media literate.

Media literacy is fostered by inculcating daily news habits. In the company of many of you, I mourn the pending extinction of print newspapers delivered to my doorstep, but we must not allow this technological transition to stand as the death knell for news consumption more broadly. The reality is that the digital revolution has placed more news and information at our finger tips than ever before, some of it very high quality, and our role as educators is to develop the news attentiveness of our students as they navigate emerging information flows.

Identifying reputable sources for news is a gateway skill. Encourage students to follow both news outlets and individual reporters on Facebook and Twitter, sign up for daily news digests like Politco’s Illinois Playbook or the Chicago Tribune’s Morning Spin, and subscribe to podcasts like NPR’s “1A” or CNN’s “The Axe Files.”


The modern era has also lowered the barriers of entry to journalism. One no longer needs to own a printing press to produce media and journalism. School-based publications are age-old incubators of media literacy regardless of whether student journalists later parlay these experiences into a paycheck. And Chicago has a healthy local youth media ecosystem of its own, working both within and outside of schools to amplify youth voice and teach transferable media literacy skills.

But teachers themselves can integrate news production into civics classrooms as students examine public issues. Encourage students to start their own blog, use an existing or invent a new hash tag, or submit traditional letters to the editor or opinion-editorial pieces. Because of virtually infinite digital capacity, the former often run online with greater frequency nowadays than the space-starved print editions permitted.

I’ve avoided the topic of “fake news” thus far and promise to tackle it in future posts, but buried the proverbial lead because I contend that the phenomenon is a second-level problem. First, we must build healthy news habits and diets. Then, and only then, do we have the luxury of teaching students (and adults) how to better discern good from bad. Indeed, “fake news” is often used as a moniker to disparage news coverage of facts that conflict with our personal political beliefs. My hope is that Media Literacy Week, alongside daily integration of these practices into our classrooms, will help to rebuild trust in and consumption of the high-quality journalism that is arguably more abundant than ever before. If successful, we will better inoculate ourselves and our students against the competing misinformation campaigns that are truly fake.

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