Thing 14: News Literacy

Thank you so much for addressing this topic. It has kept me up at night during pre and post election events. I keep thinking, what can I do as a librarian to help address this issue of "fake news" and how do I help people become more media literate. At the same time, I begin to question my own ability to be able to determine the validity, and origin of information and was/am in desperate need of time to process and educate myself further on this topic.

I started off reading Joyce Valenza's article Truth, truthiness, and triangulation: A new literacy toolkit for a "post-truth" world and was exposed to the term "post-truth" for the first time. I had been wrestling with this concept and had no idea that there was a word for it. For some reason it helped me to put a label to the concept I had been wrestling with. Anyway, there was so much great content in that article and I spent a lot of time venturing off onto the links and resources that were embedded throughout the article, which to be honest overwhelmed me. My head started spinning with all the things I need to teach and areas that I need to address. Then I began to think about "where can I fit this into the curricular content?", "What will this look like in 2nd grade versus 6th grade?", "What teachers should I start with?", ahhh.... it was too much to process!!!

The problem was that I kept reading and reading many great articles that were validating my concerns and I had this sense of urgency to address this issue in light of the recent election, however the topic is so big and complicated, that I just didn't know where to begin. So I decided to take a step back and think about what connections I could make within the my current instructional content that I am working within.

In 6th grade the classes have started a teen activism unit in which I have already gone in and helped them develop good questions for their research. My next step was to go in and help them locate valuable resources, however I decided to take it one step further and "touch on" the issues that Joyce Valenza addressed in her article. We began by reviewing some of the strategies for website evaluation that we had addressed the year prior (I was happy to see that collectively they remembered everything that we had learned 😀) and then I told them that there is a lot more to consider when reading the news. I then shared the TedEd video: How to Choose your News. Originally, I was worried that this was going to be too much for them to process, but decided that it was worth showing even if they only were able to take away 1 or 2 things. When students shared out their takeaways, I was impressed with what they were collaboratively able to pull-out of the video. Some of the main points were that there is a lot of information out there and the best source of information comes right from the people who were at an event and not from a second hand person. They also shared that people can be persuaded to write information a certain way, that there is a difference between fact and opinion and that you should always check the facts in more than one place to verify. I was very happy these takeaways, especially since my original goal was only to show them good resources. After the discussion I was able to share Youngzine that I had explored through this assignment and explain that this was a site that brings them current events, free of bias and sensationalism. Then they went off to investigate and they rocked it. The best part is another 6th grade teacher walked in and said, "I know you already worked with my class, but could you come in this afternoon and do this lesson with my group." I am glad to see that teachers also see the value in this!

As an aside, I have been wanting to document student learning more and make it transparent for students, teachers, parents. Since I was typing this up for this lesson, I decided to add it as my first transparent documentation of learning to my website. If you are interested, you can check it out: http://lakegeorgelmc.weebly.com/sixth-grade1.html.


This may be one of those "things (assignments)" that I end up doing for two assignments, because I feel that there is still so much for me to explore and definitely more that I need to teach. My goal for the year is to work this in at every grade level. Now the challenge is to think about what it looks like at each level and how I can work it into the units I already work on within the classrooms. Thanks again for the great assignment!