Facilitating Media Literacy Education in a Rural High School in China
Throughout my first month of volunteering in this high school, I could always witness crowds of students rushing out of school every Sunday afternoon when the bell rang. So, out of curiosity, I stepped out of this high school not long after them one day to see what they would do. I had thought that they probably need to enjoy some fresh air and have some rest outside until I found barely any students were on the streets near the school. As I was wondering where all the students were gone, I found groups of them in bubble tea shops, occupying every seat with sockets so that they could charge their phones and play with their phones.
This scene surprised me the most during my first month’s stay at the high school as an education volunteer with a non-governmental organization dedicated to promoting educational equity in rural China. The school, where I would be staying for a year, is in a county in the southernmost tip of Hunan province. Situated in an area bounded by mountains with extreme poverty, this high school leadership believes that Gaokao is the “only way out” for teenagers and their families, and thus it has adapted everything in the school to make way for that exam. Consequently, for the students, Sunday afternoon was the only time of the week when they could get out of campus. In these three hours, they needed to do the things that they wanted to do the most: indulging themselves in their smartphones.
While scrolling through short videos and playing gaming were the most popular activities on their phones, some students did read the news. It occurred to me that reading news could be a good thing and I wanted to encourage them to keep that habit until I realized that the main source of the news information came from platforms like Tencent’s “Kandian.” “Kandian” is an algorithm-based, profit-driven content platform embedded in QQ, Tencent’s instant messaging tool that is popular among them.
When platforms like “Kandian” constantly feed students with news information aggregated by algorithms, I was immediately alerted to the danger of such media consumption behaviors. It reminded me of a conversation that I had with the students. Once we discussed a quote from U.S. President Biden, and he said, “We are in a competition with China to win the 21st century.” The students immediately took a strong stance and quoted an article they read from “Tencent Kandian.” The Kandian article says, “China has already won the position of the strongest country in terms of military power, and we will definitely win the soon-approaching World War III!” Soon, the conversation turned into one filled with nationalist sentiments, with students associating all their guesses and lurid stories online, without credible evidence to support their opinions.
As a volunteer, my role was not teaching a specific subject or helping them triumph in Gaokao. Instead, my role was to identify their needs, stemming from which I could organize extracurricular activities to compensate for what the Gaokao-oriented curriculum failed to offer. My initial interaction with students thus prompted me to look into how this school approached media literacy education, thus I could design extracurricular activities to support students. However, it was a more challenging task than I thought.
Media literacy education in a Gaokao-first campus
Poverty-reduction funding has granted this school access to modern educational technologies, but the tools and technologies were mainly used to foster a competitive environment for Gaokao. When I spoke to the teachers about these new technologies, they reiterated the classroom changes from shabby chalks and blackboards to advanced touch screens. They would tell the students to cherish their current great conditions and “make an all-out effort to get higher scores.” For instance, in computer classrooms, teachers instructed students to use software to memorize English vocabulary, instead of showing some basic information technologies including how to type and search for information online. The teachers, however, had not encouraged students to think about the relationship between technology and society. In this Gaokao-first campus, exams are prioritized, and media literacy education is ignored.
Media literacy itself refers to people’s capability to consume media on three dimensions: to access the media, to critically evaluate media content, and to use media to participate in public discussions. In this information age where recommendation algorithms and visually attractive content prevail, the latter dimensions seem rather important as we experience increasing digital media information overload.
Granting access to media technologies by no means equals granting students media literacy. This Gaokao-first school environment, together with students’ indulgence in watching short videos and playing games on their phones without proper guidance, pushed me to ponder what I could do.
Inspired by role-playing games
I noticed that students were obsessed with playing games on their smartphones, especially the ones where they could switch roles and play in a character of their choice. One of the lessons that students shared with each other to better their skills drew my attention:
“Just remember, before choosing whichever character you will be playing on, look at what the specialties, buff, and capability they possess so that you would know how that role could function better in the game.”
I was surprised to find the students being so skilled in these gaming tactics, and I thought this could be a wonderful opportunity to teach them about media literacy. If we consider the media production process as a “game” as well, the key to building media literacy is to understand the roles that different actors play in the media production process, what power they hold, and how that may have an impact on the media products that we consume.
I decided to gather a group of students to set up an independent magazine club. I served the role of editor-in-chief and I adapted a set of procedures that work in a newsroom into club activities. The students would have their roles as journalists, researchers, editors, illustrators, and public relations and marketing specialists.
Ideally, this role-playing experiment should work as I expected — students would learn skill sets including fact-checking and critical inquiries, and understand the power dynamics behind media production. However, it worked out somewhat differently than I expected.
Searching for topics: start with ‘why’
I put up posters about the club and finally recruited 72 students who expressed interest. To highlight how media functions in a society and to embed media literacy education into club activities, I encouraged students to write articles that could involve as many stakeholders as possible so that they could learn about and reflect on the power dynamics behind media production. I also related some of our activities and discussions around media literacy education to student’s day-to-day life.
I posed questions like: what do you think can be changed on campus to build a better community? I also brought up a problem that I witnessed on campus to encourage students to reflect on their environment. For instance, an academic building with dazzling purple lighting in the classrooms appeared as a problem to me. This “purple” building, previously used for laboratories, was not designed for classroom teaching until the school admitted more students than the original academic buildings could accommodate. However, the school has not changed these extremely luminous purple lights to create a better learning environment for the students.
Surprisingly, none of the students said a word to respond to my example. It seemed that students did not consider purple lights to be a problem. They justified it using the Gaokao narrative. They said that most of the students assigned to the “purple” building ranked in the lower end of academic performance, and they thought the dizzy lighting was a punishment for students’ relatively poor academic performance. Although the school leadership had never associated academic performance with the exceedingly luminous lighting, students obviously did.
I realized that students were not used to challenging the discomfort they faced in such an environment — they just went along with it without asking why things happen as such or to make changes. To successfully launch this ambitious media literacy education activity, I decided to first encourage students to ask “why.”
I began to ask them “why” after every response they provided on the issue of purple lights, as it could break down some groundless assumptions including that intuitive association between lighting and academic performance.
Customizing workshops to tailor emerged demands
After several rounds of “why” exercises, Ming, a second-year student, spoke out, “why did the school divide students into different classes based on differential academic performances?”
I was thrilled. My role-playing experiment seemed to have an effect.
I then encouraged Ming to further investigate the issue of the division of classes. In this school, being placed into a “bad class” stigmatizes some students. Coming from a “top-class,” Ming wanted to write an article that critically reflects on how assigning students to “bad classes” creates discrimination. She took up the role of a journalist and interviewed a student from one of these classes with “bad” academic performances.
After observing some initial positive changes from my role-playing experiment, several colleagues and I designed a series of short workshops that covered topics including searching and discerning online information sources, biases of interviews, fact-checking, logical fallacies, purposes of media content, and disinformation. Instead of instructing students in a classroom setting, I blended these workshops into club activities to teach them media literacy.
Ming soon handed in her first draft of the “journalistic report.” However, many details mentioned were either exaggerated or flawed. In a commiserating manner, Ming mentioned that students from “bad classes” were not allowed to use the bathroom during a class, but it was not the reality. To raise students’ awareness against discrimination, she proposed some solutions out of her own opinion instead of writing her report based on factual details.
I started to organize several “biases of interviews” and “fact-checking” workshops for my student journalists. We asked these critical questions during this workshop plus editorial meeting: “Who said so?” “What does the author say? — Are they facts or opinions? Are they logical? What has been missed?” and “Why do they say so?”
Soon, some students who were themselves from “bad classes” began to question the facticity of the bathroom anecdote in Ming’s report. Meanwhile, there were also voices that defended the class division system based on academic performance. This dialogue then fundamentally challenged Ming’s premature report: is the author writing with a specific purpose and why? As the conversation went along, some students brought it up that we should blame the whole system of student placement and class division beyond merely voicing out for any individual students.
In this way, I encouraged students to think further about a particular social issue beyond the individuals and consider different stakeholders involved at the system level. I also asked the students to reflect on the process of media production and consumption by taking a similar system-level lens. Where do we get information? Who produces information through what media channels? Who controls the information we consume? How much of the “news” we consume every day is created for specific purposes?
Afterword
After the exercise and discussion, Ming shared that she had never been sensitive to the sources and purposes of information produced in the media until we ran this magazine club. Meanwhile, she began to realize the danger of media consumption: unverified information on media can easily mislead the audience, particularly in digital and social media.
Although writing a “media” report on this issue could not immediately improve her Gaokao scores, Ming was still grateful for this new way of learning by doing. Later, we presented the findings from Ming’s report to the school leadership, and we were surprised to see that the school principal responded to most of the issues we identified.
As I am wrapping up my tenure working as a volunteer, Ming and several fellow students will be leading a new group of students to continue making magazines on campus for the next semester. I hope that these club activities could continue as a living classroom in this high school, pushing more students to ask “whys,” helping them parse out facts from opinions, solving real problems on campus through public discussions, and developing students’ ability to navigate this ever digitalized and information-overloaded world.
Jiannan Shi is a senior student at NYU Shanghai majoring in Social Science with minors in Interactive Media Arts and Journalism Studies from NYU Global Network. In the academic year 2020–2021, he worked with an NGO to serve as an education volunteer in a rural high school in Hunan province, facilitating extracurricular activities to discuss civic issues including gender equality and ethics of technology with students. Jiannan is also a multimedia content creator, documenting the lives shaped by our society.
