What's Ahead for News Literacy

An all-out assault for media illiteracy must commence in New Jersey, and Steve Chiger may be the man to help lead the charge.

Chiger, English and journalism teacher at North Star Academy Charter School of Newark, is the president of the Garden State Scholastic Press Association, which aids New Jersey’s high school newspaper advisers. Journalism teachers work on the front lines of media education. Chiger figures this is as likely a place as any for the effort to grow.

Chiger and I agree that the push for media literacy in our schools will probably not come from the state. “I’ve never gotten the sense as a teacher that it’s a priority,” he said.

New Jersey has a comprehensive media literacy standard in its Language Arts/Literacy curriculum. Rutgers’ own Dr. Robert Kubey led the effort to include Standard 3.5: “All students will access, view, evaluate, and respond to print, nonprint, and electronic texts and resources.”

The standard includes three sections: Constructing Meaning from Media; Visual and Verbal Messages; and Living with Media. By the time we finish with our high school students, they should understand that messages are a representation of social reality, and that they vary by historic time periods and parts of the world. Students should also be able to identify and evaluate how a media product expresses the values of the culture that produced it. They should be able to analyze messages for stereotyping; they should be able to compare and contrast three or more media sources.

Under Living with Media, they should be able to use media texts to explore human relationships, new ideas and aspects of culture, for example racial prejudice, dating, marriage, family and social institutions. They should be able to figure out what political, historical, economic and social influences are affecting the media; lastly, students should be able to recognize that those who create media messages use different forms, techniques and technologies to convey their messages.

These standards cover many of the same angles that Howard Schneider is addressing with his “News Literacy” course at Stony Brook. But the state gives teachers very little in the way of actual tools for getting the job done.

In fact, under each of the sections of Standard 3.5, the state offers the same three suggested activities: a project in which students search the web for information about attaining their goals, then write an essay; a Web search for key figures in the Transcendental Literary Movement in the United States; and a Web search for material related to Milton’s “Paradise Lost” or Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” The students then write “a report on current opinion of the work.”

These three suggestions are not exactly what Schneider would recommend when students study “news literacy.” The activities are connected to media literacy in that the students must judge their source material. But we need something much more specific, much more comprehensive. Right now, it’s up to teachers to search for materials. It’s like character education. “Is anyone making you do it? No. And a lot of teachers are not media literate themselves,” Chiger said.

The way Chiger sees it, poetry is media literacy under the current standards. Another concern: the standards don’t mention whether media literacy is about fiction or nonfiction or both, he said.

So how will media literacy – training kids to be able to judge what's good media and what's bad – become a priority? “I think it will come grassroots,” he said. “Some schools will figure it out and it will spread.”

Journalism class is the best fit for the movement to take root. The first challenge is to get schools to recognize the importance of a journalism curriculum, as his school did. He is now building his school's first journalism program. The second, Chiger said, is for journalism teachers to rethink what they’re doing. Many journalism classes concern themselves mainly with production of the newspaper. They should also consider teaching news literacy, he said.

The material is a natural fit – the study of the First Amendment; press freedom, or the lack of it, around the world; journalistic hoaxes and how they occur; deconstruction of news stories to study investigative techniques; credibility of sources; analysis of Wikipedia and whether it’s a good journalistic source; comparing the same story as it’s reported by different media outlets.

Chiger does all of this in his journalism classes, although the class meets only three times a week. He needs more time. And we could all use more resources. That’s where Chiger and the Garden State Scholastic Press Association would like to make a difference. The group has already produced lesson plans on a variety of topics for its members, which are offered at its spring adviser’s conferences. “Longterm, I would love it if we got into the business of producing curriculum support or curriculum materials,” he said.

For now, we'll all keep building programs in our own classrooms, helping students to think like journalists, because that's what they need to do now. Instead of a chosen few gatekeepers collecting our information and feeding it to us, we now must go out and get it ourselves. Every student is a budding journalist, and there's "no way they could be good reporters without media literacy,” Chiger said.

We can also take advantage of excellent curriculum materials that I happened upon at these sites: the Media Education Lab at Temple University; the Center for Media Literacy; and the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers University, which offers a gateway to scores of other sites.

‘Rebooting the News’

Howard Schneider was the editor of Newsday, the Long Island daily newspaper, for decades before he retired from journalism, planning to pursue all of those pleasurable endeavors that he’d forsaken to be a news hound. But his hiatus was a short one.

Schneider is now the dean of the brand new Stony Brook University School of Journalism and he has created a new form of study that I believe is the most valuable form of media literacy. It’s called “news literacy.”

Schneider himself coined the name of this new genre, which he described at a conference two weeks ago. It is “the ability to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports,” he said.

Schneider was a featured speaker at “Rebooting the News: Reconsidering an Agenda for American Civic Education.” The conference on Oct. 23-25 in Philadelphia was sponsored by Temple University’s Media Education Lab. It was billed as “a strategic convening for journalists, teachers, educational administrators, public-policy researchers and engaged citizens.” The question to be answered at the conference was this: “How can we best help young people engage with news media in ways that help them understand and contribute to contemporary society?”

I believe Schneider has found the answer, which he is in the process of perfecting at Stony Brook, he told the conference. I was able to attend through the generous posting of his session on the Internet.

This journalist is passionate about his new vocation. He came to it in a roundabout way while teaching his first course at Stony Brook. There, he said, he discovered that his students, who by the way, were not journalism majors, fell into three groups. A third of them tended to believe everything they saw and read. A third didn’t believe anything, didn’t trust the press, believing it was motivated by profits and greed.

The final third of the class was simply baffled and confused. They would ask if Michael Moore is a journalist; if Bill O’Reilly is a reporter; if they could rely on YouTube for their news, he said.

He immediately began planning a course that would help them sort it all out.
“The mission of training the journalists of the future is crucial and we’ll do it,” he told the group, but, “the mission has to be not only training journalists, but news consumers too. That mission, to me is as important, if not more important, than training journalists.”

News is the currency of citizenship, he said. The ultimate goal, then, is to give students tools and analytical training to tell “what information is reliable enough for you to make a conclusion, to make a judgment…” In other words, can they use the information to make a decision or would that be a mistake? “I cannot imagine any citizen of the Information Age not being equipped with this skill,” he said.

Schneider said his experience gives him the skill to know good journalism, although he can’t pretend to know what will happen to the industry as its new financial model gets ironed out.

“No matter what the business model … we’re going to need an audience, an audience that can distinguish between quality journalism, journalism that really makes a difference, that they can trust, and journalism that’s junk,” he said.

Schneider starts the course by teaching students to recognize what neighborhood they’re in while consuming their media. If they find “verification, independence and accountability” by the author, they are in the journalism neighborhood, he explained.

The course points up both good and bad journalism. Students learn to distinguish news from opinion and solid opinion writing from junk. They learn the opinion neighborhood landmarks, he said.

They also learn the definition of journalistic truth – that truth is provisional, that it changes over time. This means the news consumer can never stop digging for the follow-up story. “You must follow the story over time. You must stay with the story over time,” he said.

Schneider’s course should be required of all students, probably starting in the early elementary grades. Our goal as journalism teachers should be to develop elementary and high school-level courses that do what Schneider has laid out so well on the college level.
It seems media literacy is growing up, splitting into genres. To me, it’s a great development.

Election holds a wealth of media ed lessons

This week flew by as students at my school held meet-and-greets near their lockers and rallies in the halls, raised money for TV commercials and registered to vote. It was just like a real campaign, complete with student candidates who stood in for McCain, Obama, Nader and the Libertarian Bob Barr.

In the end, Republican John McCain won the election in a squeaker, taking 98 votes to Democrat Obama’s 96 votes. The students learned a lot about the ins and outs of a political campaign and we teachers had a blast leading them through it all.

We had designed our program on my own experience in covering campaigns as a news reporter. We had ballots, registration cards, campaign finance reports, Common Cause and 527 groups. Our candidates, all volunteers from the senior class, ended their three-week campaigns with a debate before the entire student body. They were nothing short of fabulous.

Now that it’s over, I thought about how we’d designed the effort from scratch. Maybe we didn’t have to do that. I went out on the web to see if I could find some materials that could help other teachers to avoid re-inventing the wheel. I found plenty of election materials designed with media literacy in mind. Some other items turned up as well that could also aid us in our media lit efforts.

Before getting into the election it might be useful to see where your students stand on the media literacy continuum. Are they savvy news consumers? Ask them to take the media literacy quiz at PBS Teachers Web site.

Next, engage them in a lesson entitled Critical Media Literacy: Commercial Advertising. It asks students to watch TV and to write down every commercial they watch: what product is describes, the length of each commercial and the number of advertising minutes in a three-hour watching period.

They may now be ready to jump into politics, where the lesson materials are terrific.

At pbs.org, the Independent Lens provides educational materials, lesson plans and worksheets for teachers and students. Among the best offerings is “Please Vote For Me” – what a wonderful little video this is. In 10 minutes, the creator takes us through the campaigns of three 8-year-olds in China who want to be elected as the classroom monitor. This is the first democratic election that anyone can remember in the school and the three tiny candidates don’t disappoint. One of them is a budding dictator, another learns through her tears to be tough on the campaign trail. In the end, students viewers get a great lesson on the ins and outs of political races.

At Cable in the Classroom, teachers, parents and students receive instruction on how to be media-smart, which the site’s authors say is “a 21st Century skill because it provides a framework and method to think critically about the media you consume and create.”

This site offers a nifty learning experience called “eLECTIONS: Your Adventure in Politics.” It’s a three-dimensional multimedia game made in partnership with CNN Student News, C-SPAN and the History channel. You choose a political party and five positions on key issues. You then spin for your turn and move along a board that looks somewhat like “The Game of Life.” It’s pretty cool. You’re rewarded for good choices, penalized for straying from your positions on the issues.

My next discovery was “Access, Analyze, Act: A Blueprint for 21st Century Civil Engagement,” developed by Media Education Lab at Temple University, where Dr. Renee Hobbs resides. Rutgers’ own media literacy scholar Dr. Robert Kubey, in our interview last week, described Hobbs as one of the two best curriculum designers in the country.

The Media Education Lab designed “Access, Analyze, Act” for pbs.org. These excellent lessons start with students setting up their own political blogs. They later take a quiz that helps them to determine their “political personality. They are either skeptics, explorers, activists or spectators. My own students took the quiz and really enjoyed comparing notes and deciding whether they agreed with the results. The lessons are in three different sections, eventually taking students through an examination of their own Congress members’ campaigns and positions. These lessons really are well written. Teachers will love them.

A great way to round out the work on elections is to use “A Free and Open Press: Evaluating the Media.” To start, you’ll need a connection in the news media who could give you an hour's worth of wire service stories (or you could take them from the Web yourself). Students play editor by choosing and ordering the stories. Which ones will they choose to report, and how will they make those decisions?

In these ways, students begin to think critically about the media messages we consume each day, whether through political campaigns or through product placement in their favorite TV shows. There's never been a better time to be a teacher, I'm convinced.