Media Literacy
Media Literacy
These articles and resources have been selected from Social Education, Middle Level Learning, and Social Studies and the Young Learner.
Social Education
“I Know More than the Scietists”: Selecting Media Education Approaches for the Moment
“I Know More than the Scietists”: Selecting Media Education Approaches for the Moment
This multifaceted media education approach can help students recognize media influences and stem the flow of misinformation.
Media for Thinking About Media
Incorporating these teaching resources in the classroom can aid students in developing media literacy skills and deepen their understanding of how media creators shape our views.
What's New about Fake News? Integrating Digital History for Media Literacy
Examining selected digital historical records can highlight for students how their emphases, distortions, or omissions can influence perceptions of events.
Checking the Facts: Media Literacy and Democracy
By integrating the process of critical questioning of media messages into the everyday classroom curriculum, we can help produce a citizenry with the skills needed to negotiate future threats to truth.
Rx for an Infodemic: Media Decoding, COVID-19 and Online Teaching
In the midst of an unprecedented pandemic we are being flooded with contradicting and inaccurate information. How can we teach our students to critically analyze, decode, and wade through these social mediated messages?
Misinformation in the Information Age: What Teachers Can Do to Support Students
Three educational approaches outlined in this article help young people develop the capacity to judge the accuracy and credibility of online information.
Teaching Students to Navigate the Online Landscape
There is no silver bullet for combatting the forces that seek to mislead online, but we can equip students with a digital tool belt stocked with strategies.
Hidden Biases and Fake News: Finding a Balance between Critical Thinking and Cynicism
When we recognize our own biases and encourage young people to do the same, we help students understand that there is a continuum of options between not trusting anybody and blindly trusting selected experts.
Facing Fake News: Five Challenges and First Amendment Solutions
The First Amendment provides crucial context and offers a perfect lens for teaching students the skills of accessing, analyzing, and evaluating information.
To Create Media Literate Students, We Need to Start Making Media
Making media in the social studies classroom is an ideal way to teach students to be truly media literate.
Misinformation in the Information Age: What Teachers Can Do to Support Students
Three educational approaches outlined in this article help young people develop the capacity to judge the accuracy and credibility of online information.
Teaching Students to Navigate the Online Landscape
There is no silver bullet for combatting the forces that seek to mislead online, but we can equip students with a digital tool belt stocked with strategies.
Social Studies and the Young Learner
News-Group Fridays: Engaging Students in Current Events
Many elementary and middle school students are confronted by media messages constantly. They receive messages not only from family and friends, but from television and social media outlets.1 The media messages about current events are often politically biased, polarized in nature, and potentially inaccurate, especially on social media platforms.
Teachers can model how to evaluate media for potential biases, showing students that just because something is political does not mean it should be off limits for discussion.
This article draws upon experiences from both a sixth grade social studies classroom and an undergraduate methods course.
Worksheet: Is This a Reliable Source?
Handout to accompany Is the “Right to Clean Water” Fake News? An Inquiry in Media Literacy and Human Rights. Please see the article for information on how to use this handout and full citations with titles, absent here for the students to discover as they go online.
Is the “Right to Clean Water” Fake News? An Inquiry in Media Literacy and Human Rights
This article explores how to teach source evaluation to upper elementary students with a focus on the right to clean water that is recognized in a United Nations resolution of 2010, and based on the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights.
“Remixing” Current Events: Navigating the Transmedia Terrain with Fifth Graders
In “Remixing” Current Events: Navigating the Transmedia Terrain with Fifth Graders,” Daniel G. Krutka outlines how teachers can provide opportunities for students to explore current issues and “identify blind spots in media coverage.”
Teaching Current Events and Media Literacy: Critical Thinking, Effective Communication, and Active Citizenship
Upper elementary students used a variety of research skills to identify and explore current events and issues within their own community. Using an action civics approach, students also developed and enacted a plan to address the issues that their exploration of local current events highlighted.
I Don't Buy It: Critical Media Literacy in the Fifth Grade
The author explains how she scaffolded students’ learning regarding the analysis of political advertisements, thereby enhancing their ability to be informed, engaged citizens in an election year and beyond.