What to believe? Challenges in the classroom

Updates


An administrator in a New York charter school said of her students: “They’re under the impression that if it’s found in print, it’s there because someone has determined that it’s reliable.”
Jules Mermelstein, a lawyer turned history and government teacher in a high school in a Philadelphia suburb, said, “One of my seniors insisted all year that Barack Obama is a Muslim who is being planted by the terrorists to destroy the government from within. His evidence? He received a blast e-mail that said it and even brought it up on the computer to show it to me as ‘evidence.’”
More schools are beginning to integrate visual and digital media literacy into their lesson plans.  As a teacher, student or parent, what challenges do you face in the ways that young people obtain, assess and create news and information?

More Updates

News literacy insights on misinformation about immigration protests

Viral rumors and falsehoods have spread in the wake of political protests, particularly recent ones opposing detentions by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. In a story for Mashable, Peter Adams, Senior Vice president of Research and Design at the News Literacy Project, offered tips for news consumers to avoid getting tricked by false…

NLP in the News

For Education Week, educators share how they teach students to question health influencers

An opinion piece in EducationWeek by two educators from New York featured the News Literacy Project’s District Fellowship program. The commentary described how the program supported their efforts to teach students to critically evaluate health and wellness claims on social media. “By the end, our teens had developed habits of healthy skepticism when scrolling their…

NLP in the News