The Here and Now is the There and Then: Helping Youth Understand Today’s Media Landscape by Looking to the Past
Despite the pervasive myth of the digital native, today’s youth need as much guidance in navigating online spaces as any other social sphere they may encounter. Many questions we may have about interacting with today’s media landscape can be answered through a critical analysis of our past.
[This project was previously presented at the Curationist-organized panel, “OpenGLAM for OER: Digital Cultural Literacy & Engagement, from K-12 to Higher Ed & Beyond” (recording) at the 2021 Open Education Conference.]
Our concept of what media is has grown exponentially in just the short span of a decade—videos are now regularly shot and watched in a vertical format, images are regularly stripped from their context and shared in ironic juxtapositions, and the way younger generations navigate these new media spaces looks completely different than it did for those who came before.
In 2020, I worked with the non-profit organization, the Institute for Educational Advancement, which provides supplementary learning opportunities for gifted students, from ages 2 to 18, with subjects that range from STEM, to the arts, to civics. The latter being the focus of my own classes, I offered a series called “Changemakers of Tomorrow” for middle schoolers with courses on digital civics and the mechanics of voting. The summer of 2020 marked the beginning of a huge social movement in the United States, and students were in search of ways not only to join the conversation but to be heard in it.
A critical engagement with social media
My Digital Civics class was offered online for free to students in the 12–14 year-old age range, who were largely new to social media. They were familiar with the platforms that we looked at, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but most were not yet heavy users. We discussed means for identifying misinformation and locating reliable resources. We learned the basics for graphic design and video editing: how to create engaging and accessible content that enabled us to share our research with a wider audience. We also discussed how to critically look at choices made in the design and editing processes to understand how they impact our interpretation of that content. Students then did their own research on a cause that was important to them and created posts for our class’ Instagram account. Their content covered subjects ranging from global warming to the Black Lives Matter movement, from STEM education to the Navajo water crisis. My students were bright and eager to be part of the dialogue.
A lack of open resources for “digital natives”
As I was building the curriculum for this course, I was actually quite surprised at how difficult it was to identify open education resources that were current and reflected the information behavior of youth today. Most resources seemed to be several years old and made assumptions that the internet was primarily a computer-only experience. Very few accounted for the fact that a majority of students are engaged daily through their phones. Most curricula I found existed primarily to warn of the dangers of the internet (how it can be misleading or a volatile environment), but very little actually offered guidance on how to use it successfully and what that looks like.
There’s a common tendency to assume that “digital natives,” or individuals who have never lived without this digital technology, somehow understand things naturally in a way that previous generations do not. While it is true that they have never known a life without these tools, the reality is that digital technology is no different than anything else in a child’s developmental years. They see a behavior or procedure modeled by an older, more knowing person in their life and they repeat it, often without knowing why. And that’s the issue: simply having access and picking up these tools is not enough to know how to use them effectively or understand their true impact.
Saturated with technology
The reality is, most students just spent the last two years going to school online or some hybrid version of it. For better or worse, if students were not heavy users before 2020, they likely are now out of necessity. There is no getting around that fact, and the situation is not going to change anytime soon. Whether it’s toddlers watching Youtube on parents’ phones, pre-teens testing out identities through Instagram, or high schoolers sharing and resharing stories on Tik Tok, these younger generations are engaged daily with a global audience.
What a crazy thought, right? So how do we teach them to be better than the generations that came before? How do we teach them to join that conversation and recognize the responsibility that comes with doing so, especially when we are still learning that ourselves?
Digital civics is more important than ever
Technology and the way we engage with it is changing so rapidly I can’t say I’m that surprised I didn’t find the exact curriculum I was looking for. But especially after the last few years, the internet is so woven into the fabric of our day-to-day lives, that learning how to navigate it and engage in that space civilly is becoming an enormous part of our social development. If we want to teach this next generation how to make the world better — how to be leaders of change — that digital space is actually a pretty important place to start.
But what are the basic components to making sense of the internet? There are so many questions to ask. How do you track the source of an image that has been screenshot and reshared? What are hashtags and how do they impact the content we are delivered? Who are all of these people I do not know leaving comments on my posts and who are they to shape the narrative of my story? As it turns out, these questions are not as new as they may seem. They’re not even unique to the internet.
Turning to the past for answers
Throughout all of history, art and artifacts have been plundered. They’ve been displaced and renamed, or even erased entirely by imperialistic civilizations. Their modern legacy is most often shared by people who played no part in their creation. Sound familiar? A reshared post on social media may not carry the same significance as the artifacts of our heritage, but how each came to be created and how they are represented now requires asking a lot of the same questions.
When I was first introduced to MHz Curationist’s goals for participatory metadata creation, I was so excited. All that time I had been looking for a specific curriculum that addressed modern information behavior in the present media landscape. But it turned out I didn’t need to be able to anticipate what the future of technology would look like, I could find what I was looking for by turning to the past. Although it is still being developed, the Curationist tool will be an open education resource for looking at these cultural artifacts, the journeys they have taken, and how we share them today. Through this process, we can learn a tremendous amount. The ability to critically evaluate not only the artifacts themselves, but how these institutions have chosen to represent them is not so different from how content is shared across the internet.
We as humans haven’t changed that much, it’s just the tools we use that have changed. And those tools will continue to change. So while it might be hard to build an evergreen curriculum for a particular technology, it is certainly possible to look at history and challenge students to make those connections to the past — to think critically about their information behavior and the legacy of the content they will create. With the help of open education resources, like Curationist, there’s an incredible opportunity to place today’s behaviors within the greater context of human history.
Opportunities
What topics or concerns would you like us to address in future posts?
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Bethany Ellerbrook is currently the Archives Data Specialist for a film archive in Burbank, CA. Her research interests include digital/media literacy development and youth information behavior, and she has taught curriculum on these subjects to students ages 10–14. She is a writer, educator, and lover of spreadsheets. Follow her on LinkedIn.
