When I was a child, I did not read newspapers or news magazines nor did I watch the news. However, I recognized news brands because I would collect the newspaper and mail for my parents and because in our small house I would hear the nightly news broadcasts that my parents faithfully tuned in to.
That was almost 40 years ago. Both of my parents felt (and thankfully instilled in me) a civic responsibility to stay informed of local, national and global events. In addition, my father was a history teacher and taught me at a young age that today's news events are both shaped by and become history.
Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, The Providence Journal, The Wall Street Journal, PBS Newshour, 60 Minutes, NBC Nightly News were mainstays in our home. I did not read or watch them myself unless I was directed to by a parent or for a school assignment but I knew the names of these news sources that were committed to reporting facts. I would also hear my parents discussing events of the world and, as I got older, I was included in those conversations more and more.
As a mom in the digital world, I read my news online, usually on my phone. When my son collects the mail, there are no news magazines, nor are there multiple newspapers on our lawn. I have digital subscriptions to quality news sources. Which means, my child, is not learning to recognize reliable news brands, he simply sees me on my phone. He is only 6 but how can I help him recognize news brands? How do I show him reading the news on my devices is not a case of FOMO or an addiction to SnapChat?
Even if I was never exposed to these journalism brands through my family, I would learn about them through my academic research in high school and college. Navigating my way through the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, I would chose relevant articles from the pre-selected list of verified news sources. After the (sometimes painstaking) process of locating the articles (remember microfiche?) and reading the articles, I would created a citation, by hand. I would be forced to write or type the name of the sources in my "Bibliography".
Today, we have a vast amount of information at our finger tips. Teaching students how to research no longer requires hours at the library selecting a stack of physical sources that are dragged home and plopped down on their bedroom floor. No longer are students handwriting notecards, noting the source. No longer are students independently creating citations.
Instead, students are toggling between tabs on small Chromebooks screens. Quality research is easy to locate with the help of databases, type in a few key words and a list of results is returned that can be sorted by material type, date, and reading level. Students are reading the headlines and blurbs from this list. They may consider the date of publication as they skim the article and its headings before deciding to read more closely. They take digital notes in another tab through a tool like NoodleTools. They create citation by copying the MLA provided citation directly in to a citation generator tool.
Of course, stubborn students will insist a search engine like Google is better and then find themselves having to select a site from the thousands of results generated. Then we ask them to CRAAP test, triangulate and assess sources. The problem is that if you give the kids a list of sources, they can't recognize quality. They do not know that The Onion is satire. In fact, many of them do not know what satire or parody means.
How do I know this? As an activity prior to the research unit, freshman played Factitious, a web based game that shows players an article, including the source and asks if the story is real or fake. The game was developed by American University JoLT, a collaboration between the school's GameLab and School of Communication to teach users how to recognize fake news.*
While playing Factiitous, I asked students to name a reputable news source. A few were able to name one or maybe two news sources. I shared with them a graphic I created based on an article in Forbes Magazine by Paul Glader. In early 2017 Glader wrote "10 Journalism Brands Where You Can Find Real Facts Rather Than Alternative Facts." Students admitted they had hard of maybe one or two of these news brands which did not surprise me as research has shown that both students AND adults get their news through social media. Twitter, Facebook, SnapChat are not news sources. Do students understand that the news they see in their feeds are based on algorithms and may not even be news? I asked students if they understood what satire and parody sites were and most students could not even define those terms. We also took some time to check out Snopes and how to check the veracity of the sensational stories they see on social media.
If we want Americans (and future voters) to be well informed we, as educators, need to do a better job providing opportunities for students to meaningfully engage with news sources that are committed to providing facts. This can start in elementary school with age-appropriate sources such as Time for Kids. As students get older, a variety of news sources should be included in curriculums on a regular basis. How do we do this? Ideally, through a Media Literacy Curriculum that is embedded in core subjects. In the meantime, as a librarian, I subscribe to credible news journals and make them accessible in areas where students work in the library. I ask students to take notice the sources they are using from their database searches.
As a parent, I believe it is important that I change to reading print versions of the news in order to model the civic duty of staying informed and for my son to begin to recognize reputable brands.
How do you encourage students to read, watch or listen to news?
*SIDE NOTE: (big sigh) When using the term "fake news," I am talking about news that is completely fake, not an accusation with a pointed finger because the truth is inconvenient. News is a for-profit business, more competitive now than 40 years ago but there are journalists and journalism brands that adhere to a code of ethics. Students should be taught to be critical thinkers not cynical citizens. With all the negativity in the world today, especially surrounding the news, I believe that before we can have deeper conversations with students about bias and news outlet agendas, students need to be familiar with news outlets that do strive to report facts and adhere to the Society of Professional Journalist's code of ethics.
That was almost 40 years ago. Both of my parents felt (and thankfully instilled in me) a civic responsibility to stay informed of local, national and global events. In addition, my father was a history teacher and taught me at a young age that today's news events are both shaped by and become history.
Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, The Providence Journal, The Wall Street Journal, PBS Newshour, 60 Minutes, NBC Nightly News were mainstays in our home. I did not read or watch them myself unless I was directed to by a parent or for a school assignment but I knew the names of these news sources that were committed to reporting facts. I would also hear my parents discussing events of the world and, as I got older, I was included in those conversations more and more.
As a mom in the digital world, I read my news online, usually on my phone. When my son collects the mail, there are no news magazines, nor are there multiple newspapers on our lawn. I have digital subscriptions to quality news sources. Which means, my child, is not learning to recognize reliable news brands, he simply sees me on my phone. He is only 6 but how can I help him recognize news brands? How do I show him reading the news on my devices is not a case of FOMO or an addiction to SnapChat?
Even if I was never exposed to these journalism brands through my family, I would learn about them through my academic research in high school and college. Navigating my way through the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, I would chose relevant articles from the pre-selected list of verified news sources. After the (sometimes painstaking) process of locating the articles (remember microfiche?) and reading the articles, I would created a citation, by hand. I would be forced to write or type the name of the sources in my "Bibliography".
Today, we have a vast amount of information at our finger tips. Teaching students how to research no longer requires hours at the library selecting a stack of physical sources that are dragged home and plopped down on their bedroom floor. No longer are students handwriting notecards, noting the source. No longer are students independently creating citations.
Instead, students are toggling between tabs on small Chromebooks screens. Quality research is easy to locate with the help of databases, type in a few key words and a list of results is returned that can be sorted by material type, date, and reading level. Students are reading the headlines and blurbs from this list. They may consider the date of publication as they skim the article and its headings before deciding to read more closely. They take digital notes in another tab through a tool like NoodleTools. They create citation by copying the MLA provided citation directly in to a citation generator tool.
Of course, stubborn students will insist a search engine like Google is better and then find themselves having to select a site from the thousands of results generated. Then we ask them to CRAAP test, triangulate and assess sources. The problem is that if you give the kids a list of sources, they can't recognize quality. They do not know that The Onion is satire. In fact, many of them do not know what satire or parody means.
How do I know this? As an activity prior to the research unit, freshman played Factitious, a web based game that shows players an article, including the source and asks if the story is real or fake. The game was developed by American University JoLT, a collaboration between the school's GameLab and School of Communication to teach users how to recognize fake news.*
While playing Factiitous, I asked students to name a reputable news source. A few were able to name one or maybe two news sources. I shared with them a graphic I created based on an article in Forbes Magazine by Paul Glader. In early 2017 Glader wrote "10 Journalism Brands Where You Can Find Real Facts Rather Than Alternative Facts." Students admitted they had hard of maybe one or two of these news brands which did not surprise me as research has shown that both students AND adults get their news through social media. Twitter, Facebook, SnapChat are not news sources. Do students understand that the news they see in their feeds are based on algorithms and may not even be news? I asked students if they understood what satire and parody sites were and most students could not even define those terms. We also took some time to check out Snopes and how to check the veracity of the sensational stories they see on social media.
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| I created the graphic based on Glader's article to help students recognize news brands and link to them directly. For PDF with hyperlinks 10 Journalism Brands |
If we want Americans (and future voters) to be well informed we, as educators, need to do a better job providing opportunities for students to meaningfully engage with news sources that are committed to providing facts. This can start in elementary school with age-appropriate sources such as Time for Kids. As students get older, a variety of news sources should be included in curriculums on a regular basis. How do we do this? Ideally, through a Media Literacy Curriculum that is embedded in core subjects. In the meantime, as a librarian, I subscribe to credible news journals and make them accessible in areas where students work in the library. I ask students to take notice the sources they are using from their database searches.
As a parent, I believe it is important that I change to reading print versions of the news in order to model the civic duty of staying informed and for my son to begin to recognize reputable brands.
How do you encourage students to read, watch or listen to news?
*SIDE NOTE: (big sigh) When using the term "fake news," I am talking about news that is completely fake, not an accusation with a pointed finger because the truth is inconvenient. News is a for-profit business, more competitive now than 40 years ago but there are journalists and journalism brands that adhere to a code of ethics. Students should be taught to be critical thinkers not cynical citizens. With all the negativity in the world today, especially surrounding the news, I believe that before we can have deeper conversations with students about bias and news outlet agendas, students need to be familiar with news outlets that do strive to report facts and adhere to the Society of Professional Journalist's code of ethics.
Works Cited
Factitious. American University JoLT, factitious.augamestudio.com/#/. Accessed 16 Sept. 2018.
Glader, Paul. "1,322,772 viewsFeb 1, 2017, 01:10pm 10 Journalism Brands Where You Find Real Facts Rather Than Alternative Facts." Forbes, 1 Feb. 2017 Accessed 16 Sept. 2018.
Hi Kathleen, what a great and thought provoking article. You sound just like me! I hated reading the newspaper and listening to the news but that is what my parents did too and I could definitely name some quality newspapers. We do still get our newspapers delivered to our door so our children have seen us read them although like you I do get my news from online sources too. The only thing I would like to say is that the CRAAP test is currently being targeted as something that is not as useful as it used to be. Take a read of this article by Alex Couros really made me think about how I teach evaluating websites. I have not got it right by any means but I am beginning to change. http://journal.canadianschoollibraries.ca/developing-critical-literacies-what-we-need-to-know-in-a-fake-news-world/
ReplyDeleteHi Elizabeth! Thank you! That is a great article! These are skills that cannot be taught in one or two classes! Definitely have changed how I teach source evaluation over the past 20 years...and keep changing!
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