Young peoples’ lives are saturated with media. Facebook and Twitter feeds, Google ads, and YouTube videos are with them everywhere they go, not to mention the radio, TV, and print media inputs they are exposed to.
This is why educators, and the public at large, are growing more concerned with media literacy. Enter the News Literacy Project. This organization is mobilizing journalists to partner with educators in order to teach youth to discern fact from fiction and apply critical thinking strategies to the news before they consume it. Check out an overview here:
I saw a representative from the NLP present at the National Council for the Social Studies conference a few weeks ago and was struck by examples like this one:
The image on the left is NOT Michael Brown, and the image on the right is NOT the wife of the Ferguson police chief. Yet these images pop up in students’ (and our) media worlds and shape our perceptions of political, social, and economic issues.
Luckily, as more and more of us see media literacy as an essential part of students’ educational experience, resources for teaching about modern media literacy are becoming more widely available. Check some out here:
PowerPoint slides introducing 3 key ideas in media literacy (Peter Adams, NLP)
Videos explaining issues of media literacy with modern relevance (NLP)
“Teachable Moments” – compiled resources responding to real-time events in the media (NLP)
PDF of “How to Detect Media Bias and Propaganda” (Foundation for Critical Thinking)