Teaching Media Literacy for a New Era
Executive Summary
“The American people don’t believe anything until they see it on television.” — Richard Nixon
In the quote above — engraved for posterity on the wall of the Newseum in Washington, D.C. — the disgraced former president was lamenting how the Watergate scandal did not do him in until the Senate hearings were broadcast on national TV. More than 40 years later, if he were still alive, one wonders if Nixon might amend his theory for our new digital age: “The American people don’t believe anything until they see it on Facebook.”
The media environment in 2017 could not look more different than it did in the Nixon era, or even the Clinton era that I grew up in. Frankly, it looks different every day. The rate of change in how we consume media is head-spinning. As a ten-year veteran of the news industry, where my job was to make sense of what was happening in the world, even I find it overwhelming to keep up with the new ways information and disinformation spread online. Imagine what it must look like to your average pre-teen.
This is the realization that ignited my interest in the state of media literacy in America. The term, now something of a buzzword, has exploded into the national consciousness over the last year. The below chart shows Google searches for “media literacy” since 2007.
The interest in media literacy correlates precisely with the spread of so-called “fake news” across the social web. See Google searches for “fake news” below for the last decade. The graph is practically identical, peaking with the election of Donald Trump last November.
With that sense of urgency in mind, what follows is a comprehensive plan for a new approach to teaching media literacy in middle schools, when children are most likely to develop media habits that will last a lifetime.
Between the Tweets is a grant-seeking initiative that will train teachers to incorporate lessons that teach agency, basic journalism techniques, digital citizenship, social-media best practices, how to understand personalization and choice architecture online, and more concepts that will arm students with the tools they need to thrive as the media consumers, critics and makers — as well as informed citizens — of tomorrow.
The program will roll out first in a pilot program among four targeted New York City charter schools, avoiding the bureaucracy of the public system until the efficacy and scalability of the initiative has been tested and evaluated. We then plan to expand into what we hope will become a nationwide model for media education going forward.
In over two dozen interviews with media literacy experts, foundation officials, teachers, students and school administrators, along with multiple field visits, this proposal posits an answer to one simple — but not easy — question: how can we raise a new generation of media literate citizens. In order to begin, we must examine the state of media literacy today.
Market Conditions & Needs Assessment
December 4, 2016 was a crisp, cool Sunday in Washington, D.C. Donald Trump had been President-elect for almost a month, and the realities of his surprise victory had begun to set it among the Beltway intelligentsia. But for residents of the upscale Chevy Chase neighborhood in suburban Washington, December 4 was just a Sunday for errands, Christmas shopping and maybe a slice of pizza. At Comet Ping Pong, the popular local pizza joint, the lunch crowd had begun to dissipate when Edgar Welch, a 28-year-old former firefighter from North Carolina, entered around 3:00 p.m. with an AR-15 assault rifle and began shooting rounds into the air.
Welch would tell police that he came to the pizzeria to “self-investigate” a conspiracy theory that had spread like wildfire on social media during the tail end of the presidential campaign. “Pizzagate,” as it was known, alleged that Hillary Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta’s hacked emails included coded language linking the Democratic party to a child-sex-trafficking ring run out of the basement of Comet. Even by conspiracy theory standards, Pizzagate was out there. It is hard to imagine something so obviously ridiculous — having been debunked by everyone from the New York Times to Fox News to the owner of the pizzeria coming on TV to say the shop didn’t even have a basement — spreading through word-of-mouth channels. There was something different happening here, something that gave Pizzagate an aura of believability to people like Welch. What would make a mild-mannered father of two drive six hours, armed to the teeth, to investigate a rumor as far-fetched as this one?
The story’s origins are hard to trace, but one of the first instances of the Pizzagate rumor came from the Twitter user @DavidGoldbergNY, who tweeted (now deleted) in late October that the FBI was investigating Clinton’s emails again because they “point to a pedophilia ring and @HillaryClinton is at the center.” That tweet, with no basis in fact, was retweeted more than 6,000 times.
From there, Pizzagate spread to 4Chan and Reddit, where it festered and picked up steam in the corners of the web most susceptible to tinfoil-hat types. Then, crucially, it jumped back to more mainstream channels like YouTube (with a video on the topic by Alex Jones of InfoWars being viewed half-a-million times as of this writing) and Twitter, where the #pizzagate hashtag first appeared on Nov. 7, the day before the election. As the Washington Post found in its investigation, the hashtag spread in part thanks to bots and fake accounts originating in countries like the Czech Republic and Cyprus. But as the mentions increased, the story got traction from the “What’s Trending” sections of Twitter and Facebook, which, at the time, used algorithms to highlight what people were talking about on the social networks purely in terms of volume and engagement, and typically without a human editor’s involvement. Put another way: the biggest social platforms in the world had the capacity to know what their users were talking about, but not whether it was true. Their elevation of the Pizzagate story served as a lit match in the form of credibility to networks of low-information users, thus further burnishing the hoax’s validity in a continuous self-fulfilling prophecy.
Pizzagate is an example of the scourge of fake news that became one of the most bedeviling subplots of the 2016 election and has continued to vex journalists and educators through the early days of the Trump administration. The president himself has taken to labeling media outlets he disagrees with as “FAKE NEWS”, even going so far as to brand the mainstream media as “the enemy of the American people,” an extraordinary rebuke of the free press. A poll conducted the week of the Comet shooting found that 75 percent of Americans who were familiar with a fake news headline viewed the story as accurate. Put another way: misleading headlines fooled 3 out of 4 people. People who said they got most of their news from Facebook were hoodwinked at an even higher rate. A BuzzFeed survey commissioned the week after the election found the top fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top election stories from major news outlets.
“The 2016 election may mark the point in modern political history when information and disinformation became a dominant electoral currency,” said Chris Jackson of Ipsos, who conducted the former poll.
The concept of fake news — misinformation designed to spread with the intent of financial or political gain — is nothing new, of course. In the nineteenth century, newspapers were gaining popularity thanks to innovations in printing and cheaper paper costs, and the public seemed to have an unquenchable thirst for foreign news delivered by swashbuckling reporters around the world. Realizing the prohibitive costs of building foreign bureaus, many papers found an easier way: they hired local reporters to pretend like they were writing dispatches from abroad. The trick was so prevalent in German papers that it became its own genre of news, like the business section — only completely made up. German journalists called it “unechte Korrespondenz,” or the “fake foreign correspondent’s letter. Like today’s fake news, these dispatches combined real names, images and facts to create an aura of credibility that makes the misinformation easier to digest. It’s this concept — imbuing a hoax with true bits of information — that behavioral sociologists (and brothers) Chip and Dan Heath say is crucial to understanding why some ideas stick and others do not.
While we can trace the origins of fake news back in time, there is no question that it poses a particular, potentially existential problem in today’s global, hyperconnected town square. It’s a problem that was crystallized following the election, when the intelligence community announced, in no uncertain terms, that Russia had conducted an unprecedented campaign of misinformation intended to sway the outcome of the U.S. vote. This was the moment that should have been a call to arms for educators, journalists and patriots alike: how do we stop the spread of false and misleading information that threatens the bedrock of our democracy?
It was also the question that Brian Stelter, CNN’s senior media correspondent, posed at a panel discussion at NYU’s Steinhardt school in March. Bringing together mainstream journalists and media educators, the panel sought to define the problem of fake news within the larger context of the need for media literacy in America.
The first step in creating a product or solution is to define the need that exists. I asked the panel if they could agree on a definition of media literacy for the fake news era. Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, the executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and a panelist at the event, suggested the following: “Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create and act using all forms of communication.” It’s a bit broad, and maybe a little clunky, but it reflects the breadth of the initiative that we are undertaking.
In his 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, published at the euphoric height of the dot-com bubble, Thomas Friedman posited that the Internet would “make the world smaller and smaller” and eventually “make us all next door neighbors.” In fact, eighteen years after his book was written, the opposite seems true: the social web has created a reality in which our virtual neighbors look more and more like us. The global village that Friedman dreamed the web would spawn is really more like a bunch of little towns, where all the inhabitants look the same: consuming, liking, sharing, debating the same topics of self-interest.
Another prediction from the 1990’s turned out to be more prescient: Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, suggested a future in which “your newspaper could track what you skipped and reread and where you paused, then use those cues to evolve into a composite “Daily Me” that would carry only the news you cared about most. Advertisements would watch people watching them and continuously adapt to their responses.”
Negroponte was effectively describing what would become the web today. Ten years after his prediction, in 2006, Facebook debuted its News Feed — a personalized home page for every user. With the help of algorithms that were constantly learning what people wanted based on their activity, and then giving it to them, Facebook created a game changer. The News Feed was Negroponte’s “Daily Me”, the newspaper of the future. It opened a new era of personalization on the web, with an entirely new set of problems.
The effect that this era of personalization is having on media literacy is laid out in Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble, which is also the name of the term he coined to describe the online silos we all live in. Pariser writes:
“[D]emocracy only works if we citizens are capable of thinking beyond our narrow self-interest. But to do so, we need a shared view of the world we cohabit…The filter bubble pushes us in the opposite direction — it creates the impression that our narrow self-interest is all that exists. And while this is great for getting people to shop online, it’s not great for getting people to make better decisions together.”
This argument is how we must frame our media literacy agenda in 2017: as an effort to make our democracy better, by breaking out of our filter bubbles and getting back to a common set of facts.
The other piece of the marketplace that must be accounted for before we can develop a curriculum for promoting media literacy, is that the media itself has morphed into something altogether new, worthy of altogether new methods of teaching. The early days of the web were all about decentralized power and anonymity. There’s a famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993 that depicts two puppies at a computer. One says to the other: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Today, it’s more like: “On the Internet, everybody knows your breed, favorite brand of kibble, when you like to go for a walk…”
The web has morphed from an atomized web of anonymous users to a network in which an extraordinary amount of power has been consolidated into the hands of a few corporations with vast amounts of data (the new currency of media makers) at their disposal, and where anonymity is a relic of the past. Even still, companies like Google and Facebook, which determine how we communicate with the world and what we consume, refuse to identify as being part of the media. When I asked Joe Benarroch, a spokesman for Facebook, whether the world’s largest social network was a media company, he responded: “Facebook will become a media company only when Facebook starts to create content.” Tell that to 1.2 billion daily content creators that have vaulted Facebook to one of the 10-highest market capitalized companies in the world a mere five years after its I.P.O.
An understanding of just how seismically the media industry has changed in concert with the evolution of the web is a key component of media literacy education, and one that is sorely lacking in many of the current media literacy programs I observed over the past several months. There are educators across the country doing important, and often overlooked, work in this field, but their efforts are mostly ad hoc, piecemeal or under-resourced.
Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, the executor director of NAMLE who spoke at the panel mentioned earlier, says the overarching dilemma facing media literacy educators is how to make their agenda a national priority. Fortunately, the explosion of interest in the field following the election has given her organization and its members a new feeling of momentum. “I used to spend 25 minutes explaining to people what we do,” she told me. “Now I have people calling and asking for our help.”
NAMLE lobbies for media literacy legislation on a state-to-state basis, provides workshops for K-12 teachers and funds after-school programs for students in partnership with Common Sense Media, another non-profit advocacy organization. Lipkin says the field is crowded, but what is needed most is a curation of the resources and tools that already exist. “In an ideal world, media literacy is seen as a way to teach and not what to teach.”
I found that this view was echoed by nearly every other educator I spoke to. Dr. Jonathan Anzalone, assistant director at Stony Brook University’s Center for News Literacy — considered by many to be the gold standard in the field — said that one of the major hurdles he faces is how to contend with the layers of bureaucracy present in public schools. His team focuses on concepts specific to journalism: evaluating sources, analyzing articles and spotting falsehoods. While these are helpful tools for any curious citizen, Anzalone says the difficulty lies in figuring out where, and how, to incorporate them into curriculums that have been designed around standardized testing. There simply isn’t time in the school year, and the pace at which the media is evolving makes it more difficult to adapt curriculums already in place. “As social media, and now fake news, has taken off, we’ve had to adapt to new realities,” he says.
Rhys Daunic considers this his life’s work. The New School media studies graduate founded The Media Spot to answer the question of “how to shoehorn this stuff” into schools. The Media Spot partners with public schools around New York City to increase media literacy with a focus on production. With assistance from Media Spot “consultants” in their classrooms from 5 to 40 days of the school year, teachers use project-based lessons for everything from teaching third graders how to use Google, to “digital citizenship” best practices for middle schoolers. Daunic calls his technique “embedded professional development” and it is a rubric for how to scale media literacy education going forward. He believes, like Anzalone and others, that one-off workshops and after-school programs “just slip away”, and the trick to ingraining complex media concepts in students is to give them hands-on projects that enhance themes and issues as addendums to what they are already learning in the classroom over the course of their matriculation.
In order to get a first-hand look at how media literacy is being taught today, I traveled to two schools on the opposite ends of New York City’s socioeconomic divide, yet bound by educators devoted to this cause.
The John Jay Secondary School of Journalism, with its impressive-sounding name and location in a handsome, midcentury schoolhouse on a bucolic block in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, casts a misleading shadow. Inside, it is a case study in the uphill battle public school students face every day in cities like New York. The high school, which is one of five city high schools crammed into the five-story building — in which students, many of whom come from chronically disadvantaged Brooklyn neighborhoods like Brownsville, must pass through a metal detector to reach — has no media literacy curriculum to speak of, but does benefit from after-school workshops taught by members of The Lamp (Learning About Multimedia Project), a 10-year-old non-profit organization that works throughout New York City schools and community centers to teach media production fundamentals.
Jules Beesley, the education director of The Lamp, says he often finds teachers who are struggling with preparing their students for the tremendous amount of testing that is required in New York State and do not have the time, or technical training, to add to the already strained curriculum. They reach out to him, and he deploys facilitators like Sara Montijo to come in, after school, and develop multimedia projects with students who show interest. As I found during my visit to Montijo’s session, this formula, while commendable, is simply not scalable. On the day I joined, only two students attended. We spent the afternoon talking about news and propaganda, and then, armed with handheld camcorders, set about the school to interview other students about their day. The hands-on approach felt gratifying in a way that a classroom lecture wouldn’t — and our students left energized at having created their own content. Yet as I left them with a list of newspapers and books to read (they said the school did not provide students with accounts for any paywalled sites such as The New York Times), I could not help feeling dispirited. One paid facilitator for two students, an hour a week, after school was simply not a feasible path forward. My visit put into stark relief the difficulties of rolling out new pedagogical programs on an ad hoc basis in the current public system. I needed to see how it worked on the other side of town.
My spirit brightened when I visited the classroom of Duane Neil, the longtime director of the art program at The Chapin School, a private all-girls, K-12 school that sits across from Gracie Mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Chapin, with an annual tuition of $43,000 and free from the albatross of state teaching regulations, proved that a comprehensive media literacy education, organically placed throughout the curriculum, is not a pie-in-the-sky idea, when given the resources to succeed.
Neil’s job is ostensibly to teach art to 7th to 12th grade girls from his bright, spacious studio at Chapin. But he has developed, over 30 years in the classroom, a powerful method of using images to teach about different media constructs. As one example, Neil says he has brought in “food stylists”, armed with blow-up photos of mouthwatering hamburgers from fast food ads. The students deconstruct the ads to see that the sesame seeds on the bun are actually glued on and the meat is ice cold so that the cheese melts just right. Nothing, they learn, is as it seems.
From there, Neil’s students go on to study fashion ads and analyze the ways in which the men in the ads are always positioned so that they show a sense of power over the women. “When you invert the gender, there’s a great a-ha moment when the kids see that it just doesn’t look right,” he says.
In my favorite exercise, Neil showed me collages of seemingly random phrases that students cut out from magazines, ransom-note style, to create their own poems. The lesson? “To decontextualize words, releasing them from their bureaucratic-commercial context.”
“Media education is all about pulling the curtain back,” Neil says. “We’re arming these kids with the tools so that they aren’t easily seduced by what they see … it’s about learning that all media is constructed … There’s a reason behind everything you see.”
Neil worries that the rapid introduction of social media into children’s lives — particularly the isolating effect of it on the preteen and teenage girls he teaches — has made these lessons more difficult to break through, and that students just accept what they see on social media in ways they might not with magazines, television or other forms legacy media. Going forward, he is framing his approach by flipping the old media theory of “agency” on its head: while it used to relate to organizations that create media, now we must think of users and consumers as having equal agency. Media industries no longer impose meaning on passive audiences. In the social age, audiences (users) have power to create their own meaning. Neil is right — this must be the root of how we empower students to become media literate.
Proposal Description
Compulsory education in America did not come about via some landmark Supreme Court decision or presidential decree. It was a byproduct of the shift from an agrarian society to a mass production culture. As families moved to cities to be closer to the factories, a countermovement sprung up to prevent children from toiling in the mills alongside their fathers. The solution was school. Between 1920 and 1936, the share of teenagers in school more than doubled, to 60 percent. As more children spent their days apart from their families, they developed new customs and social mores — separate, for the first time, from those of their parents. With the possible exception of the car, it was not until the advent of mobile technology that youth culture experienced a similar sea change. American adolescents are as independent now as they have ever been in history. Which is why it has never been as urgent as it is now to instill the tools in them to interface with the world outside their classrooms and dinner tables: the world of screens that now eats up nearly 11 hours of an average American child’s day.
Every successful non-profit initiative identifies a problem in which the solution has a general implication. The spread of fake news and other tools of disinformation and manipulation, coupled with the lightning-fast speed at which social media moves, has given those of us who live at the cross-section of media and education a feeling of exigency to our mission. Between the Tweets aims to use this feeling of immediacy to power a first round of funding and staffing. As such, our mission and vision are outlines as follows:
MISSION: Build a scalable, immersive and comprehensive media literacy curriculum for middle-school students
VISION: To raise a new generation of children to be discriminating consumers of media
In tackling a mission and vision this big, it is helpful to build a SWOT analysis as a method for evaluating the current landscape and where our initiative fits in. The SWOT table highlights that this proposal’s biggest strength is the massive national interest, as well as its appeal to four of the five levels of Maslow’s hierarchy (safety, belonging, esteem and self-actualization). Its biggest challenge is the inherent disruptive nature of any new educational program that threatens the status quo, and the calcified nature of those bureaucracies.
To hedge against that challenge, the Between the Tweets program will focus on middle-school students, defined as those enrolled full-time in fifth, six, seventh and eighth grades. After some analysis and in consultation with Renee Hobbs, one of the foremost scholars in media literacy who founded the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island, it was determined to narrow the scope of the program to middle school in order to maximize benefits for students at a crucial time in their learning development, as well as to avoid biting off more than we can chew for a successful rollout.
Perhaps surprising to those of us who grew up before the Internet or smartphone, middle schools in America are now almost entirely made up of digital natives. A 2016 survey by the marketing firm Influence Central found that the average age of a child receiving his or her first phone is 10.3 years old. Half of 12-year-olds have at least one social media account.
Lest we be swayed by the results of a marketing study, I paid a visit to my former middle school in the New York City suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, a quaint, leafy village of 8,000 located about 20 miles north of Manhattan on the Hudson River. Farragut Middle School is part of the town’s public school district, with 480 students spread across grades 5–8. Gail Kipper has been principal at Farragut since 1999, and has seen the changes in how students interact with media up close. Now, she says, almost every one of her students carries a device (though they must be stored in lockers during the school day). “Smartphones have become a rite of passage for kids as they get to middle school,” she says. Parents are almost expected to provide a phone to rising fifth graders as a token of their growing up. They will go on to check these phones an average of 150 times a day as they mature.
Farragut, like the other schools I visited, has piecemeal programs and elements of its curriculum designed to teach “digital citizenship,” but no comprehensive media literacy mandate. Kipper’s deputy, Assistant Principal Chris Keough, told me that the need exists, and they have found ways to address it by adapting the “Technology” unit that New York state requires (a class that I nostalgically remember being called “Wood Shop” when I attended in the late 90’s), as well as by delegating the school’s librarian with the task of developing a methodology around a “learner-active technology-infused classroom.” Farragut also uses elements of the Common Sense Media program to promote issues of media literacy within the state-mandated STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) curriculum.
In another echo of what I had already heard, Kipper explained that the district had moved away from socio-emotional learning programs, such as D.A.R.E., that rely on outside instructors like police officers to come into classroom on an abbreviated (often 10-week) basis. “These programs simply don’t work,” she says. “There needs to be a collaboration with teachers over a long period of time to see results.” Any teenager who ever sat through a D.A.R.E. lecture and went on to try pot would probably agree.
Indeed, all the research points to the importance of an organic approach to incorporating lessons and theories of media literacy within the existing curriculum. Kipper points to an initiative with a local Shakespearean theater troupe as a possible model for our purposes. Years ago, Farragut, through a grant, earmarked money for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival to establish a residency at the school. The program was so beloved amongst students and teachers that the school district now absorbs the cost (passed on through local taxes) to continue it each year. Shakespeare is now as ingrained in the culture of Farragut as its math or science departments. By way of example, it is clear that buy-in from administrators and teaching staff remains the most critical obstacle.
Before we can discuss how and where to implement the Between the Tweets program, it is helpful to outline a basic scope and sequence by grade that dovetails with what students are already learning in class and complements what is happening in their personal development outside of school. This outline is not comprehensive, but shows the arc of the program. It is designed to be used holistically, or grade-to-grade, depending on the needs of the specific institution.
Grade 5
Fifth grade acts as a bridge between elementary and middle school. Some districts place fifth-graders physically in the middle school; others keep it apart in the elementary school. Either way, it is around this time that students are beginning to interact with the outside world — becoming interested in more than just what is happening with their family and friends. As a personal anecdote, it was in fifth grade that I became obsessed with the newspaper. My parents had The New York Times delivered each day, and around the time I was 11 I would spend time each morning leafing through the paper, making my fingers black from newsprint, as I studied the photos and read the articles I could understand. I remember feeling like a grown-up for the first time, and my experience with the newspaper is not atypical (but for the fact that fewer kids are going to school with newsprint-stained fingers). One parent told me her fifth grader has become obsessed with the news since the election, logging on to a handful of agreed-upon news sites before and after school every day.
Between the Tweets will focus broadly on teaching basic current events in fifth grade, in the form of show-and-tell type exercises where students find a story they think is interesting and report on it to the class. But the crux of the Grade 5 curriculum will revolve around the basic concepts of advertising that children are already being bombarded with.
Instructors will be trained in Duane Neil’s methods of hands-on, image-based lessons, such as the “ransom poem” project, that deconstruct advertisements to reveal the agendas of advertisers. Students will learn to think like advertisers, imagining who their audiences are for given products (ie. why do infomercials air overnight? Because viewers are more able to be influenced when they haven’t slept.) They will learn about “weasel words”, the vague, overused terms in copy that describe “anything or nothing” and then locate ads in magazines or websites that use them. Over the course of the year, students will learn about signs; they will keep a running list of all the signs they come across in a given day, learning about the purposes of different signs (ie. stop signs vs. billboards). Teachers might also employ activities where students match products and logos to their advertising slogans, and identify products being sold by pieces of their logo out of context.
The purpose of the Grade 5 curriculum is to gradually introduce current events and news into students’ daily lives, and at the same time provide a basic understanding how advertisers now use much more complex means to deliver their messages within the visual media the students are already consuming (ie. product placement in film, targeted Google ads).
Grade 6
The difference between fifth- and sixth-graders is big, at least in their minds. They are now fully a part of middle school — which often means homerooms, class changes and different grading structures. The program will capitalize on their new feelings of agency by employing a pared-down curriculum of “Journalism 101”, turning each student into an amateur reporter, questioning everything. It will build on the current events lessons of Grade 5 by having students regularly analyze newspaper stories, understanding the inverted pyramid method of reporting, and conducting their own interviews, with parents or peers, using the Five W’s. We will incorporate the techniques being taught by Jon Anzalone’s Stony Brook program, in particular their tested seven-step process for evaluating a news story to see if it is providing the best version of the truth.
This will also be the time to gradually introduce the fake news problem, by examining popular fake news stories spread online (ie. Pope Endorses Trump) and analyzing how they differ from fact-based stories in respected outlets. FactCheck.org has useful resources for this.
Given that social media has replaced the morning newspaper as the first place most of us read about the world (the American Press Institute found in 2015 nearly 90 percent of young people get their news from social media), students will learn how to identify sources of news with obvious points of view on social networks; they will watch packaged TV news to see how pieces were edited to produce certain reaction (emotional, outrage) in viewers, all while constantly asking to consider the sources of the information they are receiving: is it in the news neighborhood, the opinion neighborhood, the gossip neighborhood?
The News Literacy Project has a helpful tool called the Checkology Virtual Classroom, which includes lessons hosted by well-known journalists, that can be used to enrich issues of news literacy we are introducing at this level. As an addendum, students will learn best practices for Google searching using keywords (and a bit about how the Google search algorithm works) and sourcing techniques of journalists. The through-line in Grade 6 is creating the contours of the amateur sleuth, teaching students to act like reporters in their everyday interactions with media of all types.
Grade 7
In seventh grade, most students are officially teenagers. It’s the ideal time to transition the curriculum to focus on digital citizenship. Common Sense Media, previously mentioned, is the leader in the digital citizenship education space, providing a comprehensive package of tools and lessons on internet safety, privacy, reputation management and cyberbullying. We will supplement this curriculum with discussions related to self-worth and vanity of crowds on social media. (Do you take a post down if it doesn’t receive enough “likes”? Why are your friends’ posts online always more constructed to show their happiness than what they share with you in person?) Additionally, students will learn basic lessons on how Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other major platforms make money with their users’ content, and all the while instilling in students the “question everything” approach to online safety. It is crucial here that teachers do not take a fear-based approach, as research shows teenagers feel like they are being talked down to, and rebel.
Instead of framing online relationships and communication with a predator-prey mentality, teachers should teach students to ask basic questions when talking with someone online, such as: Have I felt pressured or manipulated by this person? Has this person asked to keep anything a secret? Do I feel true to myself when I am communicating with them? The rubric of the Grade 6 curriculum can be replicated here by focusing on the “sleuthing” techniques students are already familiar with.
Grade 8
Eighth graders are on the precipice of high school, either looking forward to shedding their “middle schooler” stature or dreading it with every bone in their body. To conclude the curriculum, we will broach more advanced media theory concepts that they can use in their arsenal going forward. Lessons around the following theories will be introduced: personalization and the filter bubble (your Google results are different from your friends, even if you search the same term), identifying sponsored content (from ABC’s Disney TV show in 1952, the first example of native advertising, to today’s sponsored posts camouflaged to look like content) choice architecture and the attention economy (when you open a social app and notice a pause before it shows you notifications; this pause is intentional to make you keep coming back to it, like a slot machine). In addition, eighth graders will begin maintaining an open-source database, shared across partner schools, keeping track of hoaxes, memes, fake news purveyors and misleading sources, with the hope that they will continue to build upon it after graduation. This engages students in a Wiki-based pursuit of crowdsourcing information that can help other students and the public at large in fighting misinformation. Again: it is arming them with agency.
As always, real-world examples and hands-on lessons plans will be the tools of our trade, always with a “question everything” mentality.
Again, these brief scope outlines are meant to be just that — the contours of an educational curriculum intended to build, year upon year, a toolbox of literacy and criticism techniques for a changing media landscape, organically delivered by trusted teachers. While some of the curricula will be further expanded upon and efficacy tested by Between the Tweets staff and in lab of the classroom, much of it will deploy lessons that already exist and have been used by educators and nonprofits already in existence. In this way, Between the Tweets will work as the connective tissue to bring the right resources into classrooms at the right time. John Anzalone, the Stony Brook professor, told me the field is in desperate need of an organization to lead the massive task of organizing and handling logistics. “We need a go-between to put those who teach this stuff and those who need it in the same room,” he says. There is an extraordinary amount of useful media literacy content in the world — our job will be to deploy, scale and build upon it.
In researching how to roll out the program, I determined the best practice is to begin with charter schools in New York state. Simply, the amount of red tape a new unit of education or increased teacher training would need to go through in New York’s Department of Education before it made it to the classroom is prohibitive for phase one of our initiative; it’s even harder on a federal level. Charter schools, publicly funded but independent from the vast hierarchy of the DOE, provide a fertile ground for the first phase of our rollout.
To gauge interest in a program of this caliber, I met with David Zurndorfer, president of the Broome Street Academy, a 330-student charter school in SoHo that opened in 2011 and advertises a mission of “no-nonsense nurturing.” While Broome Street is a 9–12 high school, its operating procedure is similar to New York City charter middle schools that we intend to approach.
Zurndorfer, a lawyer by trade, says that while Broome Street students must abide by certain state standards, such as passing the Regents, “there is no required curriculum, per se.” When evaluating new educational programs, the board takes direction from the Head of School (the principal). The 14-member board would only hold a vote if the new program required a new expenditure, and even then it would likely pass if the head of school was recommending it.
“We have a lot of discretion in what we teach,” Zurndorfer says. “And this is something a typical charter school would love for all the obvious reasons … media literacy is incredibly important and incredibly difficult to get at.”
From a successful run in a handful of New York charter schools, Between the Tweets can expand its staff and contracted trainers to other local schools, and from there become the model for a nationwide program — what business consultant Jim Collins would call our Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal.
Funding Request
Between the Tweets is seeking a four-year grant in two traunches, with an opportunity for review after the first two-year period (Traunch 1). In speaking with Peter Madonia, the chief operating officer of the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the country’s largest philanthropic institutions, it is clear that this approach allows us to retain high-level staff, as they won’t worry that the funding could disappear overnight, as well as a period of review in order to ensure we are hitting certain benchmarks on time and on budget as a means of risk mitigation for the institution providing the funding. The four-year proposal will have a clause that ensures the second two-year period (Traunch 2) is contingent upon foundation review after the first (Traunch 1).
In choosing the charter middle schools in New York City to be part of the Traunch 1 pilot program, we have identified four institutions in different neighborhoods that will provide a socioeconomically diverse set of students and teachers upon which to test the efficacy of the curriculum. These schools are:
Central Queens Academy — Elmhurst, Queens
Harlem Village Academy Middle West — Central Harlem
Summit Academy — Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
Girls Prep — Lower East Side
Our staffing and other financial needs for Traunch 1 are as follows:
FULL-TIME
(1) Program Director 80,000/yr.
(2) Curriculum Editors 70,000/yr. each = 140,000
(2) Research Assistants 40,000/yr. each = 80,000
(1) Coordinator & Admin 50,000/yr.
350,000 /yr. x2 = 700,000
CONTRACT
(8) Two trainers per school 100,000/yr. each = 800,000
(4) Assistant per school 60,000/yr. each = 240,000
1,040,000 (Y2 only)
OTHER
WeWork private office space 400/mo. = $4800/yr.
Administrative, Utilities & Contingency 25,000/yr.
29,800 /yr. x2 = 59,600
- Taxes 279,000 (@15%)
TOTAL TRAUNCH 1 (Years 1+2) FUNDING: 2,078,600
Depending upon the success of Traunch 1 and the appetite for expansion, the specific funding needs for Traunch 2 will be calculated during the review period at the end of Year 2. One of the difficulties in funding a project like this is the realization that it is a long-term play without clear-cut benchmarks that are easily measured over short periods of time. While we can set certain benchmarks we intend to hit in terms of training and teaching hours, students reached, etc., the foundation that works with Between the Tweets should understand that it is taking a leap of faith. The payoff, if we do it correctly, is that a relatively small investment would begin to change the way an entire new generation of citizens interacts with media.
Madonia, the Rockefeller COO, told me philanthropies that traffic in difficult-to-measure causes like education and climate change are familiar with this way of thinking. “The great thing about foundation work is that you can take enormous risk without being constrained by shareholders, revenue targets or voters,” he says. “Other entities that can scale are tied down in ways foundations aren’t in a capitalist society.”
Between the Tweets speaks to this philanthropic mindset. With a lean, entrepreneurial spirit we believe we can effect scalable change in a hugely important field over time. With this framework in mind, the following foundations — all of which are legally obligated to give away a percentage of their endowments to maintain 501(c)(3) status pursuant to the tax code — will be targeted given that their scope of work in either media or education philanthropy aligns with our mission and vision:
The Knight Foundation
The MacArthur Foundation
The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation
The Bezos Family Foundation
Foundation leaders are most interested, when it comes to long-term investments such as this, in how their money can influence citizenship and governance, according to Madonia. By positioning our work as creating better digital citizens and more informed future voters who are more capable of (and interested in) engaging with government, we can, in Traunch 1, create momentum among students, teachers and parents. There are 25 million children aged 6 to 11 in America today — all of them potential beneficiaries of this initiative. Seldom does a cause create a sense of necessity on a national scale the way media literacy in 2017 demands our attention. This is the opportunity to begin to turn the tide.
Long-Term Development & Conclusion
There is an infamous, possibly apocryphal, story I once heard during my career in television. Supposedly, when Fox News was just beginning, and its audience of mostly older, retired viewers would leave their televisions on all day, they would find the Fox News logo had literally “burned in” to the corner of their sets. Angry phone calls would flood cable companies, and, as the story goes, this is the reason the Fox News logo slowly turns on the bottom of the screen now.
This kind of “burn-in” doesn’t just happen to screens. All of us, even the most responsible consumers of media, are at risk of intellectual burn-in as we spend more of our time in a balkanized information environment. This is partially why the mainstream media was caught so remarkably off guard with the election of Donald Trump. It’s just so easy for us to stay in our comfortable bubbles, interacting with the media we like, being shared by our friends on our closed social networks as Google sells us ads against links to things it thinks we’ll want based on what we’ve clicked on in the past: Of course Hillary was going to win — everyone I know said so!
In a certain way, this is what we’re up against: increasingly calcified media habits that are increasingly easy able to manipulate. Perhaps it’s too late to teach new tools for consuming media in the digital age to middle-aged Americans set in their ways. Madeline DiNonno, the CEO of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, says it’s far easier for a young person to learn a social norm than an adult. This is why we are targeting preteens and teenagers, when they are learning the mores and habits they will retain as adults, and why, if we remain careful in avoiding mission creep, we hope to scale the initiative across the country while remaining focused on fifth-to-eighth graders. It is also why our innovative structure of training teachers to holistically incorporate our curriculum into their classrooms — as opposed to hiring outside instructors — has an added benefit of exponential scalability: the more educators trained in the Between the Tweets model, the more opportunities they then have to train others, either as contractors for the next funding traunch, or even on an unofficial basis, spreading our gospel through the teacher’s lounge and eventually reaching a kind of escape velocity. This “hockey-stick” model of efficacy is a secondary long-term goal of the initiative.
Pablo Picasso once said, when an interviewer asked him if he used calculators in the process of making art: “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.”
What Picasso meant, that true intelligence comes from the ability to ask questions, is the foundation of the journalistic trade. But in today’s media landscape, where everyone is both journalist and reader, consumer and producer, we need to redefine the way in which we teach children to interact with media — turning them from passive users to active digital citizens and media critics. By reimagining how media literacy is taught for the 21st century from the ground up, Between the Tweets seeks to reengage a new generation at a critical time in their learning. This massive undertaking is one of the causes of our time, and I ask for your support in taking it head on.
Notes & Works Cited available here
