How do we help students become critically literate in a digital world?
Before discussing how adolescents can critically use digital media, we must first discuss what it means to be critically literate. Students are exposed to multitudes of information during their daily lives. It is up to us as mentors to teach and encourage students to sift through the data they are receiving and form valid, educated opinions and then be able to share these opinions with fellow peers. In doing so our students become appropriately critical of the information they take in. As David Foster Wallace says in his commencement speech, This is water, it is difficult to fight your inner monologue and ensure that you are looking at things under a critical eye. However, if we first become aware of what we should be looking for, we will be on the correct path to becoming critically literate in the digital world.
According to David Buckingham on page 48 of his article Digital Media Literacies, there are four necessary areas that we can focus on to improve students critical use of digital media. These include being aware of the audience associated with the media, being aware of themselves as an audience, being aware of the language used and how it can affect the reading, and teaching students how to produce knowledgeable opinions about the information they are taking in. By helping students cultivate these skills, we will prepare them for participating digitally in today’s world.
The first area we should focus on with students is what Buckingham refers to as representation. This is where we teach students how to be aware of what they are reading, who the author’s intended audience is, and what motivations may be behind this particular piece of media. This especially factors into articles students may see on the internet or in the news. We have to teach students to look beyond just content. We can no longer determine that a website is accurate based solely on whether it ends in “.edu” or “.com” or even “.gov”. For the right amount of money anyone can buy a website domain. According to an article published by The Guardian written by Johnathan Douglas, it is important to help students build on their reading comprehension skills in order to then introduce critical literacy. Only then will student be able to read the media fully and with a critical eye. You can encourage kids to annotate things that may stick out to them as odd. You can teach students to then look at the author who wrote the media and do some research on them. This will help students determine why the author is writing, who the author is writing for, and what the author is writing about. You can teach students to look for exaggerated language in whatever it is they are reading and have them determine the tone of the author. The following video can be shown as a creative way to show students how author bias in the media may be affecting them. Another great way to teach students about bias is by giving them articles on the same topic written by different people. Students can then compare and contrast these articles in order to see how different people may have different opinions.
It is important to teach students how to be aware of their own bias as well. Sometimes students can fall into an echo bias. This is where students are surrounded by other people who may have similar identities to them. However, these opinions don’t represent everyone. This can become dangerous for students if they are composing things that may make them seem offensive to others. It is important to be able to write for your audience when you are composing things like facebook, instagram, and twitter posts. Students have to be aware that what they post has the potential to last forever on the internet. If they make one inappropriate joke online at 15 years old, this may keep them from finding a job when they are 30. For example, we can look at a meme that was posted during the recent Kavanaugh trial that says that Christina Ford was too ugly to have suffered a sexual assault.
Not only is this image discrediting a very serious incident, but can also be perceived as crude and even bullying. If a student were to post this online, it may come back to haunt them later on in life. This is why it is so essential that we teach our students to think about who will be seeing this post and then thinking twice about posting it.
A book entitled Critical Literacy written by Maureen McLaughlin, proposes several strategies that teachers can use in their classrooms to promote critical literacy in the media. The first is to pose problems to students that the article may have. Things such as “whose opinion is seen?”, “whose voice is not heard?”, “what could alternatively be said?” are good ways to start students thinking about a digital article or post in a different light. Students can then go on to look at alternative perspectives of the same topic. Teachers can help guide this according to McLaughlin by first explaining to students what critical literacy is, and then demonstrate the strategies to students, then guide students through the practices, then have students practice on their own, and then reflect with students about what they may have seen. This gradual release of responsibility will help students become critical digital consumers!
Resources
Buckingham, D. (2007). Digital Media Literacies: Rethinking Media Education in the Age of the Internet. Research in Comparative and International Education, 2(1), 43–55. doi:10.2304/rcie.2007.2.1.43
Douglas, J., & Director of the National Literacy Trust. (2017, October 17). Fake news: Improved critical literacy skills are key to telling fact from fiction. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2017/oct/17/fake-news-improved-critical-literacy-skills-teaching-young-people
Foster Wallace, D. (2018, May 18). This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio). Retrieved from https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
McLaughlin, M. (2017). Teaching Critical Literacy. doi:10.18411/a-2017–023
