Teacher Jami Rue teaches students a critical thinking lesson at Providence Englewood Charter School in Chicago.
“It was a newspaper. An online newspaper,” Rue said. “What’s Inside the Newspaper and How It Connects to the Writer’s Perspective.”
Rue teaches media literacy, which she says students need now more than ever.
“They’re taking this information and saying, ‘Oh, that’s it, that’s the end of the story,'” she said.
For Rue, those lessons include checking newspapers and even popular memes.
“You had a crowd of people upstairs and then you had cameramen at the same event, who were about 10 steps back,” he said.
“So from that perspective, they didn’t even see that there was a difference,” she said.
The state of Illinois mandates media literacy lessons for high school students, and New Jersey requires lessons for grades K-12. The goal is to encourage critical thinking among the tech-savvy generation.
โThe media, which we are using to get our information and need to analyze to get our satisfaction from entertainment and persuasion, needs to be consumed in a thoughtful way,โ said Yonti Friesem, co-director of Media Education Lab.
This involves encouraging students to ask themselves some questions about the things they consume.
“The first is who is the author and what is the purpose of this message?” Freesem said.
“What are they saying? What are they trying to get you to do or influence you to do?” Rue said.
News literacy falls under the larger media literacy umbrella and encourages students to understand bias or misinformation in their news sources, regardless of where they find the news.
Ideally, the concept would be taught by different teachers in different subjects such as science and social studies.
“A math class, because you’ll be thinking about things like how do we interpret poll numbers, how do we interpret statistics,” said Michael Spikes, director of the Teach for Chicago Journalism Project at Northwestern University.
A 2021 Common sense media report Shows that 38% of tweens have used social media.
and according For a study from the British Journal of Developmental PsychologyStudents’ belief in conspiracy theories tends to peak around the age of 14 โ creating a perfect storm for some.
โIt, you know, exposed us to many more voices than we had heard before. But it has also opened the door to a lot of voices who are trying to convey some message. Could be with ill intent,” Spikes said.
Mike Webb, vice president of the News Literacy Project, said students are just as susceptible to both misinformation and misinformation as adults, especially when it comes to social media and things like that. COVID-19,
“Football Players, Asphalt Hamlin, Joe was injured within seconds of his injury, people were saying, ‘Oh, that was COVID,'” Webb said.
they are one Variety of Online Resources For parents and teachers to help kids become better consumers.
“My favorite one is You’re the Editor because it puts you in a scenario where there’s a car accident and you have to determine what really happened,” Webb said.
“Okay, so let’s take this further. Our medium is online publishing,” Rue said.
Rue says she has a fast bunch, but even they get tripped up from time to time; This is where lessons come in handy.
“They have to learn how to dig deep as well as support and understand them โ it’s okay to wonder,” she said.
