Overview
The News Literacy Project is a response to the growing challenge of assuring that America’s young people get the information they need to become well-informed citizens and voters in the 21st century.
Tapping into the passion journalists feel for their craft, the project brings active and retired journalists into middle schools and high schools to encourage students to seek verified information on any medium or platform. Journalists are joining forces with teachers to do so through a core curriculum, their own compelling stories, hands-on exercises, videos and the use of digital media.
The journalists are matched by the project’s staff with social studies, history and English teachers. Print, broadcast and online reporters and editors, producers and photographers are visiting classrooms or participating in videoconferences with students through Skype.
The classes help teachers meet required state and national standards, even as they draw on the journalists’ experience and expertise to increase students’ understanding of the reliability of news and other information. This helps students think critically about what they read, hear and see; distinguish valid arguments from fallacious ones; and analyze ideas from primary and secondary sources.
The highly adaptable NLP unit does not replace existing curriculum; rather, it complements it and is integrated into it. The unit can be done during the course of three weeks or embedded throughout a semester or the entire school year.
The unit has three phases: the introductory lessons led by the teacher, the journalists’ presentations and a concluding project by students to build and reflect real understanding. All students complete pre-unit and post-unit assessments; teachers and journalists are also given evaluation surveys at the end of the school year.
Throughout the unit, teachers and journalists draw on NLP’s detailed classroom guide, which includes nearly two dozen original lessons. Some lessons are for teachers, some for journalists and some for either. The curriculum addresses such digital platforms as search engines, blogs and Wikipedia. Students are learning how to discern among media messages and how to produce accurate information themselves — whether they’re texting, blogging, posting on YouTube or Facebook, or telling stories.
Teachers choose from a menu of possible final projects. These include assigning students to create their own newspapers or an audio or video piece based on reporting in the community; having students create a song, rap, video or game based on some aspect of news literacy; or blending the news literacy focus with a research project from the classes’ standard curriculum.
The journalists focus on how to distinguish credible information from opinion, spin, rumor, advertising and propaganda. They also discuss why news matters to young people and what the First Amendment and a free media mean in a democracy.
Teachers request journalists based on their subject matter. A White House or city hall reporter might be a good fit for a government class, a former foreign correspondent might work well in a history class, and a feature writer could be ideal for an English class. Sports and entertainment reporters connect with students across a wide range of subjects.
Sometimes the match is an even tighter fit. An English class studying genocide in Rwanda might hear from NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston, who wrote a book on this subject. A middle-school class studying “Enrique’s Journey” — the story of a Honduran boy who risked unimaginable hardship and danger to join his mother in the United States — might do a Skype call with Don Bartletti, the Los Angeles Times photojournalist who shot the Pulitzer Prize-winning photos for this series. A history class studying the muckrackers and reading Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” might hear Michael Moss of The New York Times discuss his investigation of corruption in the meat-packing industry.
Students are assigned to read or watch the journalists’ work before the journalist arrives so they will know what the journalist does and are ready to engage. Students also are given reading and other assignments about journalism and news literacy. Classroom sessions emphasize the students’ engagement through exercises and their own work.
Active and retired journalists have also worked with students in an after-school programs in New York City and Chicago. Students have created impressive video and audio reports about their communities and issues within their schools.
NLP’s partner news organizations provide additional enrichment. Some newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune, have donated copies of their papers to NLP students for use in classroom activities. In New York and Chicago, students have made field trips to newsrooms to meet with reporters, editors, photographers and producers and to see journalism in action.
"The News Literacy Project is a simple but powerful idea,’’ said Tom Rosenstiel, founder and director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism and a member of the project’s advisory committee. "Everyone knows we need to do media literacy, and this is exactly the way to do it.’’