Teaching Students to Decode the World

Media Literacy and Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum

Chris Sperry, Cyndy Scheibe

• Editore: ASCD
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781416630951
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Education Teaching Methods

In our media-saturated environment, how can we teach students to distinguish true statements from those that are false, misleading, or manipulative? How can we help them develop the skills needed to identify biases and stereotypes, determine credibility of sources, and analyze their own thinking and its effect on their perceptions?

In Teaching Students to Decode the World, authors Chris Sperry and Cyndy Scheibe tackle these questions as they introduce readers to constructivist media decoding (CMD), a specific way to lead students through a question-based analysis of media materials—including print and digital documents, videos and films, social media posts, advertisements, and other formats—with an emphasis on critical thinking and collaboration. Drawing from their decades of experience as teachers, consultants, and media literacy advocates, the authors explain how to

* Develop and facilitate CMD activities in the classroom and in virtual teaching environments;
* Implement CMD across the curriculum, at all grade levels;
* Connect CMD with educational approaches such as project-based learning, social-emotional learning, and antiracist education;
* Incorporate CMD into assessments; and
* Promote CMD as a districtwide initiative.

This comprehensive guide explains the theoretical foundations for CMD and offers dozens of real-life examples of its implementation and its powerful impact on students and teachers. Equipped with CMD skills, students will be better able to navigate a complex media landscape, participate in a democratic society, and become productive citizens of the world.

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Chapter 1

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The Imperatives of Media Literacy Today

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During the 2011–12 school year, we delivered a series of trainings for teams of librarians and science teachers to support the integration of media literacy and critical thinking into elementary science. At the third and final meeting of the group in March, we heard the following story from one of the teams. After the initial daylong training in September, the elementary teacher had turned to her librarian colleague and said, "What do these people think I am supposed to do with my 1st graders? My 6-year-olds can't do the kind of critical thinking they are proposing." The librarian had responded brilliantly: "Well, let's see what we might do." She then asked the teacher about her class, her greatest challenges, and her next unit. The teacher explained that she was struggling with a number of boys who seemed to be interested only in violent superheroes. Her next science unit was on matter: liquid, solid, and gas. The librarian went to work looking for the right media document.

A few days later, the librarian showed the teacher a 30-second clip from a Marvel video, Spider-Man vs. Hydro-Man. They decided to use it for pre- and post-assessments for the unit on matter. They showed the clip and asked students what was accurate (or true) and what was inaccurate (or not true) in what the video showed about liquids. In the pre-assessment, the students had no idea. But at the end of the unit, the class was able to give evidence-based responses that demonstrated their understanding of the properties of liquid. In the discussion, one student explained, "Hydro-Man walks around just made of water. That's wrong because we learned that liquid takes on the shape of whatever it is in." Another student chimed in with "the vessel." And another response was "But after Hydro-Man turns into a puddle, we see the sun heats him up and he begins to evaporate." Another student said, "That can happen because a liquid can turn into a gas when it gets too hot."

The teacher was delighted that the 1st graders were able to apply their content learning from the unit to the analysis of popular culture. But then the teacher went on to do the kind of media literacy questioning she had learned in the training by asking, "So, you are telling me that the Spider-Man video shows things that are not true—not accurate science? Why would the makers of the video do that?" One student responded, "They didn't make the video to teach us real science; they made it to be fun." After some discussion about the purpose of movies and TV shows, the teacher asked, "So what does this exercise teach us about what we need to do when we watch TV?" After a pause, a student said, "We need to be careful not to believe everything we see on TV because not everything on TV is made to be real."

The most exciting part of the story is what the teacher shared during the debriefing at our final professional development session. She was shocked by her 1st graders' ability to think so abstractly. This teacher was an experienced and accomplished educator, yet she—like all of us—was subject to prior assumptions and expectations about her students. Other teachers who participated in that series of media literacy trainings shared the same realization:

• Children can be stretched even further than I expected. They need to be given the opportunity to think and express themselves using concrete information to support their ideas."
• [From now on] I will not be afraid to let my students think. Too often I direct their thinking to get to the goal I want them to reach. I will let them explore and think more critically about what I am teaching."

One of the most important reasons to practice question-based media analysis with students is to bring forward their impressive abilities to teach one another complex understandings from their own developmental place. Another reason for this work is to give all students access to the power of literacy and critical thinking. In the words of a 10th grade student when speaking about the impact of media literacy, "It made me realize just how much power people have to change or control things, for better or worse. I, however, am not passive to this change. I can be a part of it and affect it."

Enfranchising All Students

Educators who have been trained in this type of inquiry-based media analysis—what we call constructivist media decoding, or CMD—regularly comment on the high level of student engagement in the process. They describe how media decoding brings forward the views of traditionally quiet or disengaged students. Here are a few quotes from the teachers who participated in the initiative for integrating media literacy into the K–12 science curriculum:

• The kids stayed on and continued the discussion after the bell rang."
• This got students involved who have no intrinsic motivation."
• It really helps students use a different part of their brain than they're used to using at school!"
• Even my 'trouble' students raised their hands and had good comments!"

The last observation struck a personal chord for Chris. He describes himself as having been one of those "trouble" students, in part because he was a terrible speller. Although he was deeply curious about ideas, he could not—and still can't—keep track of the letters in words. This simple difference in orientation led Chris to believe that he was "stupid." And when one feels stupid in school, it is typically a torturous place to spend six hours a day. When a middle-class White boy in the 1960s, with lots of privilege, can become alienated from school because he's a poor speller, it's no wonder that millions of students without those advantages can feel deeply challenged in traditional classrooms.

One of the primary imperatives for incorporating media literacy into the classroom is the personal empowerment of students. By diversifying the types of texts we use in school—using engaging popular-culture documents for complex classroom analysis, ensuring that we include texts that reflect a variety of perspectives, and varying the modalities we use for assessment and instruction—we enhance the capacity for a greater diversity of students to feel that school is an empowering place. When we do that, all students learn better.

In 1979, when Chris began teaching at the Lehman Alternative Community School (LACS), a progressive public school in Ithaca, New York, he was confronted by the challenge of choosing texts. His wonderful little school drew a broad range of students—and they knew it. On one side of the room, the children of Cornell University and Ithaca College professors, typically confident (or at least comfortable) with academics, sat together. On the other side of the room sat students who, in many cases, came from families for whom school had rarely been empowering. Both groups had multigenerational experience with success or failure linked to the process of schooling.

And at the heart of that experience was the printed word. Chris could see it in their body language when he handed out a reading. The "academic" students were typically interested and intellectually critical. But his alienated students, many from rural and less educated backgrounds, showed discomfort and even anger. When Chris made texts simpler, the change backfired and increased the polarization in the room, as students took offense at the notion that he had "dumbed things down." As someone who learned to read through the pictures in comic books and who became a confident communicator through making films about surfing, Chris could empathize with the discomfort of his disgruntled students. More importantly, he could see their brilliance despite their challenges with "traditional" academics.

Diversifying Texts

In this context, Chris turned to the very options that provided the key to his own success in school: diverse media forms. He began bringing in photographs and paintings to teach history, video and film clips to teach geography, songs and stories to communicate cultural and historical perspectives. Although he used these various kinds of texts to teach and reinforce social studies knowledge and concepts, he also asked students to analyze the texts: "Who made this and for what purpose?" "What is their perspective and bias, and where do you see it in the document?"

Although Chris first began using question-based media analysis in his media production classes, he soon incorporated it into his social studies and English classes to teach core content as well as critical-thinking skills. This approach made learning more engaging for all of Chris's students and leveled the classroom playing field. In fact, many of Chris's students who were the biggest media consumers were often better at analyzing popular-culture messages than their more "academic" peers. For all of the students, it was more fun to engage in a rigorous task—analyzing engaging media documents—than to passively take in the instruction.

In the 1990s, when Chris and Cyndy began training teachers in this approach, the educators shared other reasons why the repurposing of media texts to teach content and literacy was so important. They spoke about how the process connected to the "real lives" of students and prepared them for life in our hypermediated world (even in the 1990s). They saw how it could effectively integrate the teaching of literacy skills and subject-area knowledge and concepts through inquiry. They appreciated its adaptability for use as lesson prompts, for brief activities, for core instruction, and as assessments. And they gravitated to this process for teaching controversial and emotional topics that benefited from an evidence-based analytical approach.

Developing Habits of Questioning

Today's students have grown up in a mediated world quite different from that of their teachers and the younger students who will follow them. Two constants for all these cohorts are a growth in new media forms and an increase in youth media consumption. Although we cannot know the kinds of media forms that will be ubiquitous for the next generation of students, we can anticipate the skills, attitudes, and habits that will better equip them to have agency in their mediated lives. Students then (as now) will need to recognize the constructed nature of media messages. They will need to continually reflect on the meanings and effects of the media messages they consume, share, and create. They will need to think critically about the forms of media as well as the content. They will need to habitually ask critical questions about authorship, sourcing, credibility, and bias. And they will need to reflect on their own thinking about these messages—and their own preconceived notions—as they negotiate truth in a hypermediated world.

To become internalized, these skills and attitudes need to be continually repeated, at all grade levels and in multiple curricular areas. Media literacy needs to be integrated across the curriculum. The crush of new curricular mandates and content makes this goal seem impossible, but the approach to media literacy advocated in this book is methodological. It advocates the repurposing of textbooks, videos, websites, and all the diverse media we use to teach our curriculum to also teach critical thinking and media literacy.

Teaching our students to think critically about mediated messages must not be limited to the most sophisticated higher-order thinking skills relegated to upper-level high school and college classes. We often hear that this work needs to wait until students have the core background knowledge and sophistication that will enable them to think critically. That view is like saying that we should aim to teach students to read when they are ready to handle Shakespeare. As was indicated in the earlier Spider-Man vs. Hydro-Man example, even young students are capable of thinking critically about authorship, purpose, credibility, and bias—at their own level. Developing these habits cannot wait. It is at the heart of learning.

Media, Literacy, and Democracy

It is important to note that U.S. copyright law also plays a major role in supporting this work in schools. In some countries, teachers are not allowed to repurpose copyrighted media documents (video clips, images, songs, etc.) because of restrictive copyright laws. In the United States, copyright law includes a fair use clause, an underappreciated policy that enables critical thinking for the nation's democracy. Currently the fair use doctrine allows the repurposing of copyrighted material for critique and criticism in an educational context without permission from the copyright owner. Therefore, fair use gives educators the right to repurpose media messages in the classroom. Democracy gives us the responsibility to do this continually.

When the founders of American democracy debated about the culture that was necessary to shift from monarchy to rule by citizens, they discussed literacy, education, and the media. They decided not to establish a government newspaper, arguing that was what the British monarchy had done. Instead, they agreed to subsidize the delivery of newspapers to all interested citizens. The postal subsidy was created in part to enable the political media of the day—newspapers—to reach all U.S. citizens. And these papers were overtly political. Most newspapers for the first 80 years of the nation's history were linked to, if not directly controlled by, political parties (Starr, 2004). The founders recognized that wide-ranging political debate through the media was a core component of democracy.

The founders also recognized that democracy was dependent on an electorate that was capable of understanding the conflicting and complex issues of the day. In 1817, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "An enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight" (Arthur, Davies, & Hahn, 2008, p. 403). Within the origins of the United States, the links among literacy, public education, and democracy were drawn.

At the same time, issues of power and control were explicitly connected to literacy, public education, and democracy. After the slave revolt led by Nat Turner in 1831, it became illegal to teach an African American to read and write in most slave states. Frederick Douglass is often quoted as saying, "Once you learn to read, you will be forever free" (Wright, 2019, p. 1). Although the founders saw literacy as essential to democracy, the systems they created denied both literacy and democracy to specific groups of citizens. Today, media literacy can play an enfranchising role in empowering all students to experience the freeing power of 21st century literacy.

Causes of an Infodemic

According to the World Health Organization (2020), in addition to being in the midst of a terrible pandemic, "we are also in the midst of a massive global 'Infodemic': an overabundance of information—some accurate and some not—that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it" (p. 2). We are living in a time when one group's fake news is another group's certainty, when facts have become arbitrary, and when our identities determine our truths. This epistemological chasm has great implications for democracy and for media literacy. Media—both the messages and the forms of communication—play an ever more important role in shaping public consciousness. It is worth taking the space to explore the mediated factors that led us to this infodemic (Sperry & Scheibe, 2020).

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, the medium of television was a dominant force in public meaning making, especially about political ideas. Radio, the medium that brought voice into living rooms and gave Americans their first "personal president" (Franklin D. Roosevelt), was replaced by a medium dominated by mass-produced images and sound bites. Television, with its emphasis on looking good, paved the way for John F. Kennedy. In 1960, the young first-term senator defeated a sitting vice president in a close election that may have turned on the first televised presidential debates. If the election had been a decade earlier, before TV had replaced radio as the primary news medium, the result of the election might have been different. The election of 1960 reminds us of Marshall McLuhan's famous saying, "The medium is the message" (McLuhan, 1994, p. 7).

The 1980s then brought Ronald Reagan, "the great communicator," to the White House. Reagan's principal media advisor, Michael Deaver, said, "People absorb impressions rather than substance, particularly in this day and age"; and Reagan, with his background as a film and TV actor, knew all about impressions (PBS, 1999). When Reagan was introduced to the team that created his famous "Morning in America" ads for the 1980 presidential election campaign, the future president said, "If you're going to sell soap, you ought to see the bar" (Beschloss, 2016, p. 4). Reagan understood that victory would come through selling the right impressions of him—and America—through the medium of TV.

It is important to note that the tendency of the electorate to vote for the candidate who has the best handle on the dominant media of the day preceded the modern era. The 1840 "campaign as spectacle" used parades, sloganeering, popular song, and the Log Cabin newspaper (along with lots of free booze) to enlist the newly enfranchised White farming men of the American West (e.g., Ohio) to vote for William Henry Harrison. Horace Greeley, Harrison's campaign manager, successfully spun an impression of a hard-drinking working man despite the fact that Harrison was a 68-year-old Washington, D.C., aristocrat (Shafer, 2016).

Fast-forward to 2016, when Donald Trump used his experience with reality TV to dominate both traditional and social media. Despite significant negative coverage, his ability to break through the clutter and galvanize his base vaulted him to the White House, where he broke many norms of presidential behavior, including through the continuous renunciation of facts. Although much of the mainstream media played its traditional role as fact checker, much of the country had changed along with its media. The advent of the internet and social media enabled Trump to delegitimize mainstream news (at least for his base) and to present "alternative facts" that reflected his and their views of reality. The shift from the airways to fiber-optic communication, from the New York Times to Twitter, and from Walter Cronkite to Tucker Carlson, helped create the presidency of Donald Trump.

Politics, Filter Bubbles, and Echo Chambers

Broadcast television in the mid-20th century, with its limited number of news channels, needed a huge viewership to be competitive. The ABC, NBC, and CBS networks vied for the attention of the nation by catering to the political middle. The economies of scale in broadcast news helped marginalize "extreme" perspectives as an ethos of "objective" journalism helped keep ...