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.