The Need for Media Lit in High Schools

A smart essay published recently in Utne Reader reminded me of a topic that I've long wanted to cover in this space. Writer Danielle Maestretti argues that in an age of information overload, we're shockingly lacking information literacy. In her own words:

The debate over how we read, perpetuated largely by media insiders, is starting
to seem like little more than a distraction from the real problem: We have
access to more information than ever, yet we do not know what to do with it. We
are desperately information-illiterate.

Maestretti also does a good job of describing what information literacy means nowadays:

In 2009 literacy isn’t about finishing a book or slogging through 12 web pages
to get to the end of an article. It is about knowing what to do with
information, how to find the good stuff, how to assess sources. What matters is
not that we are readers, but that we are critical readers.

So, yes, we need literacy training of this sort. Where should we find it? No better place than high schools, for starters. What should be taught? How about this, just as a basic day-one curriculum for students launching into research projects:

- How search engines work and how to get the most out of your searches
- The benefits and drawbacks of Wikipedia -- "a great place to start a search and a terrible place to end it."
- The ethics of taking short passages from blogs, articles or other information sources, regardless of whether you're linking to them or not
- How to find the source of information that you're quoting

And that's just on the topic of research. Because the media landscape is changing so rapidly -- with newspapers faltering, audiences splintering and opinion-mongering becoming the norm -- the time has come to work media literacy into the high school curriculum. There is overlap between info and media literacy, for sure, with the latter simply being more focused on the news media industry.

Many students will never take a journalism class in high school, let alone in college, so in a way this type of instruction is akin to chemistry for liberal arts majors (one of my personal favorites.) In other words, this introduction to the 24-hour news cycle and the business side of journalism might be some students' only exposure to a topic that can easily be introduced in social studies classes that cover American institutions.

If we're looking to reach the next generation of (mostly online) readers and news consumers, what better way to start than to introduce them to the changing media landscape, and to do so early on in their education.

More on this topic soon...