Teaching Media Literacy within the Social Studies

Whether modern media support or subvert the development of informed, responsible citizens may depend less on the products and programs themselves than on the process by which creative teachers bring them into the classroom and curriculum to meaningfully engage students in thinking critically about media representations, industries, and ideologies, together with social effects and consequences.

Considine, D. (2009). From Gutenberg to Gates: Media Matters.

The Social Studies, 63-73.

Teaching student to read through and about the newspaper better prepares them to be educated citizens. We believe that an active sense of citizenship entails being critical of how news is received and used in society. Developing the practice of critically reading the newspaper fosters no only newspaper reading skills that are useful for citizens but also general practices that allow citizens to discern the world around them and act accordingly.

Segall, A. & Schmidt, S. (2006). Reading the Newspaper as a Social Text.

The Social Studies, 97(3), 91-99.

The media is a pervasive, influential part of students’ daily lives and one that they need to be aware of and understand, both as consumers and as producers. Both Considine (2009) and Segall & Schmidt (2006) express the importance of students learning to be critical of the media and its message, and suggest methods to teach to these skills. Considine (2009) covers the wide array of media that students encounter – from news outlets, to movies, to music – and offers an method to help students make sense of their encounters with all of these types. The TAP method (Considine, 2009, 64) has students examine each media representation through looking at text, production and audience. Similar to Lesh’s (2011) “text, context, subtext,” the TAP method teaches students that media is just another form of the texts they will encounter and teaches them how to read (or view, or listen) to them in a way that they understand the author’s purpose and to be aware of how that affects their understanding. Segall and Schmidt (2006) focus on an examination of newspapers. They see how newspapers are often used in the classroom as an extension of the textbook – a seemingly unbiased “living textbook” – and explain the importance of reading them, and thinking about them, critically. They argue for teaching activities that teach students to read the newspaper, examining it from front page on with a critical eye for how the language, layout and content choices create the news.

Being a critical consumer of media is an important aspect of citizenship. Just as students need to be taught that there are many representations of history, the same is true with what is happening currently in the world around them. The same skills that students use to examine any text or video in the classroom should be extended to modern media. Media literacy does not need to be a pull out class, or taught only in a Civics class, there are many opportunities for it to be integrated into the Social Studies curriculum. Historic newspapers, advertisements, photographs and other media can be examined as primary sources using the “text, context, subtext” method – adding another dimension to the study of many eras and historic events. Using the media as a primary source lends itself to the examination of media as a primary source about the world today and a discussion about how just as historic documents are examined on multiple levels, the same needs to apply to modern media.

Just as it is important to be a critical consumer of media, it is also important that students learn to see themselves as producers of media and to understand the power of the free press and what that can mean, and what responsibilities, that holds for them. The media can be a method of civic engagement and offers individuals opportunities to have their voice heard – if they know how to use it. The role and responsibilities of a free press (and what limits that entails), is especially important now that it is no longer just reporters who are producing media, but rather any person who blogs or tweets, or even re-posts something on facebook. Media literacy is no longer just about what one receives, but also how one interacts with it. The responsibilities that the press must hold itself too – including issues on liable and privacy – can now apply to individual students. Creating opportunities in the classroom for students to create media – weather it be interacting with newspapers through writing letters to the editor or submitting an op-ed to a local paper or making videos or a blog, and opening it up to the outside world, these are important skills for students to practice, and to understand.

Here are some other resources for teaching media literacy (in all its dimensions) in the classroom:

• ·      Newseum (resources for teachers on teaching media literacy): http://newseum.org/education/teacher-resources/lesson-plans/index.html
• ·      Bill of Rights Institute (articles about current controversies over the freedom of the press): http://billofrightsinstitute.org/resources/educator-resources/headlines/freedom-of-the-press/
• ·      Library of Congress (teaching with historic newspapers): http://blogs.loc.gov/teachers/2013/03/teaching-with-informational-text-historic-newspapers-from-the-library-of-congress/

The Importance of Civic Education

“The better educated our citizens are, the better equipped they will be to preserve the system of government we have. And we have to start with the education of our nation’s young people. Knowledge about our government is not handed down through the gene pool. Every generation has to learn it, and we have some work to do.”

—Justice Sandra Day O’Connor

 “America as a new nation was not created out of devotion to a motherland, a royal family, or a national religion. Americans are instead defined by our fidelity to certain ideals, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments. While citizenship is formally acquired through either birth or naturalization, all of us must learn to become Americans. Peoples from diverse cultural, religious, and racial backgrounds can fully join the American community by sharing its defining commitments. If Americans are not bound together by common values, we will become fragmented and turn on one another.”

—Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools (2003)

In the report, “Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools” (2003), produced by a variety of educational organizations and institutions dedicated to civic education, the importance of civics education is framed within the structure of maintaining and enhancing Democracy for the future. Civics education is explained as a right of every citizen. Citizens of the United States are, by birth or naturalization, afforded a number of rights. However, these rights are not worth very much unless citizens understand how to access them. The United States is incredibly large, and diverse, and what binds Americans together is their shared responsibility for, and in, government. However, once again, to value and utilize their role as American citizens, students must first know what this means. Who then is responsible for teaching Americans what it means to be a critically engaged citizen?

This report argues that, as this is a set of knowledge and skills that all citizens deserve, and need, access to, it must be taught in schools. “Competent and responsible citizens” are informed and thoughtful, participate in their communities, act politically and have concern for moral and civic virtues (p. 6). These are skills that can, and must, be taught to students – if the goal is to have an active, engaged, and informed citizenry.

            Schools, and teachers, teach on two levels: the surface concepts and skill sets that make up each discipline, and the larger concepts and skill that are much more subjective, but also help the student realize their role in the world. Ideally both these “thinking skills” and the content are combined and taught together. The term “21^st century competencies” gets thrown around a lot right now – people are realizing that in an ever “flattening” world the skills that students need to know go far beyond the mimetic. What this means to me is that students need to know how to interact with each other, and the wider world, be engaged and see themselves as change-makers. These texts, the report “Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools” (2003) as well as Wayne Journall’s piece, “Standardizing Citizenship: The Potential Influence of State Curriculum Standards on the Civic Development of Adolescents” (2010), reminded me that this is not a new concept, but rather one that a lot of the history of public education in the United States is based on. While STEM skills are important, especially for economic viability, having a hierarchy of academic importance, where the humanities are cut to make way for math, or vice versa, is not helping students. No skill set will be complete if students do not know how to take their knowledge and use it locally, nationally, and globally. The report, “Guardians of Democracy” offers many recommendations, as to how schools can better prepare students for civic involvement, one of which is to “view civic learning as an interdisciplinary subject that can and should be employed across the curriculum (p. 41).” There is a danger in having schools, teachers, parents, and students see civics as something that is only taught in classes such as Civics or AP Government. There are great opportunities to focus on civic learning in all content areas and should not be regulated to one class, or one area of the curricula, especially within the Social Studies. 

Teaching with Museums

“For the exhibition of historical information to contribute to humanistic education, it must involve information that other people want and need. This is a tricky proposition. Those who have information to display typically control the form and content of its presentation, and they may have the power and the resources to impose their conception of ‘needed information’ on others. This dominance is a particular problem within the exhibition stance because it is less obvious: Analysis, identification, and moral response are easily recognized as social constructions, but information that is simply displayed can take on the appearance of a natural, inevitable, or objective representation of the world. It appears to “mirror” historical reality rather than to interpret it.”

Barton, K. C. & Levstik, L.S. (2004) Teaching History for the Common Good.

Lawrence Erbaum Associates: Mahwah, New Jersey. p. 121.

The “exhibition stance” of history, as explained by Barton and Levstik (2004) is the part of the demonstration of knowledge aspect of learning history. Part of knowing history is expressing what is known, and this performance can be positive, a way to reflect what has been learned and to teach others, however there is also the risk of it being detrimental to the goal of educating students to be active participants in democracy. The harmful possibilities range from the idea of being “good at history” as having the ability to debate encyclopedic knowledge of historical minutiae, to the teaching of history “to the test.” While it is easy to get caught up in the negative aspects of the exhibition of history, Barton and Levstik reassure us that this performance of history is not all bad. Many people find purpose in learning history as having the ability to pass it to others (p. 124), whether it be a grandparent passing down experienced history to their grandchild, an older sibling teaching what they learned in school to their younger sibling, or a historic site or museum showing their history. However, while admirable, these forms of exhibition also pose risks, namely in the fact that these presentations of history are often taken as fact by students, because they come from an authority figure they trust (family member, historical institution) and forget that this is just another source, among many, and that it will have its own purpose that needs to be taken into account.

On Wednesday (2/20) I attended a workshop organized by Facing History and Ourselves about teaching rescue and resistance and the Holocaust. The first part of the workshop was a tour of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) led by the museum’s director of education. While I have visited the museum many times before, I interned in the archives department as an undergrad, this tour, aimed at educators and focusing on the museum as a learning resource, was a very different experience. Learning about how the museum’s layout, exhibits, even lighting, are designed to provoke different thought processes in visitors, and how these all reflect the mission of the museum reinforced Barton and Levstik’s (2004) warning that even if information in the exhibition mode appears “natural, inevitable, or objective”, it is in actuality another way of interpreting and presenting the history, and like all sources, has its own purpose. The purpose of the USHMM is stated as such:

“The museum’s primary mission is to advance and disseminate knowledge about this unprecedented tragedy, to preserve the memory of those who suffered; and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon the moral and spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as their own responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.” (USHMM.org)

The emphasis on the role of the museum as a “living memorial” that is still evolving in order to both connect with new generations and to ensure the continued teaching and connection to the Holocaust was reflected in the museum through the described changes that have been made to the museum over the years, and their continue focus on understanding how their visitors respond to the museum, and how they can affect this response. I personally believe that the USHMM does a wonderful job of taking extraordinarily sensitive subject matter, intellectualizing it, while still allowing for the emotional response and reflection that is necessary when learning about something of this magnitude. However, this is part of its purpose, and it is important, especially when learning about a topic historically affected controversy and requiring sensitivity, like the Holocaust, that students be aware of how information is being presented to them, and why, and not take any information at face value without thinking critically about it.

            Observing student groups going through the museum, I thought about how teachers can take an intense learning experience, like USHMM, and ensure that students are both learning about the subject matter and thinking about how it is presented to them. Some students I watched were completing “scavenger hunts” –searching for specific information in different parts of the exhibits, while others had journals which they would pause to write in, while others were going through it in small groups with a teacher. Each of these systems will accomplish a very different learning objective. Understanding the purpose in using any resource, even a historical site or museum that may be part of the annual field trip circuit within a department, is extremely important. Resources are out there to help educators in figuring out how to best use these sites. For teaching the Holocaust, the museum’s education web site (http://www.ushmm.org/education/foreducators/) and Facing History and Ourselves (http://www.facinghistory.org/antisemitism) that can help guide deciding on what the purpose of the unit would be and how to utilize the museum as one, wonderful, yet not-without bias, source.

Teaching with Narratives

Narratives may help use understand history, but in their selectivity they also stand between us and history. Out of the pasts’s unlimited expanse of people and actions, narratives necessarily set limits –they tell stories about these people and not others, and they group actions into these events and not others. In itself, that is no constraint, because selectivity is unavoidable. Constraints arise when narrative is confused as history itself, so that alternative stories and alternative ways of conceptualizing history appear illegitimate. Precisely because stories are so powerful, we tend to think they are true in and of themselves rather than representing the outcome of choices people have made about how to organize a set of (selectively) true statements.

Barton and Levstik’s Teaching History for the Common Good (2004) pages 146-147

One of the main cultural tools used to teach history in the United States, according to Barton and Levstik, are narratives. They use narratives to describe when historians choose particular events, order them through causal links in order to tell a story. These stories are often easy packages of history that translate well to the classroom. Rather than examining one time and everything that was happening at that moment, simplified narratives that students make connections from, understand change, and identify with history. Teachers use narratives for many reasons beyond these. Students are familiar with the narrative structure, they have been exposed to it all their lives and are used to learning within it. Furthermore, a good story is engaging, which is a goal in the classroom.

While Barton and Levstik describe the advantages that narrative offers, their text seems to focus more on the constraints, the pitfalls that is easy to fall into when using narrative structure. While teaching history is all about gatekeeping – it would be impossible to teach everything about any time period in the time allotted – when told within a narrative the people and events mentioned get credibility, while those not mentioned can loose their legitimacy in the eyes of students. There is a danger in students becoming attached to certain narratives, it can be argued that many in our nation are, or seeing them as the truth, and the only truth, rather figuring out for themselves what they think our history means.

In my introductory post to this blog, I already exposed my love for the narrative structure of history. I came to love history through stories, and stories are still the way I find history the most engaging. However, I also agree with Barton and Levstik about many of the constraints of teaching history with the narrative structure. One page 5 of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (2001) Sam Wineburg writes: “achieving mature historical thought depends precisely on our ability to navigate the uneven landscape of history, to traverse the rugged terrain that lies between the poles of familiarity and distance from the past.” This balance is hard to find in the classroom and narratives can trap students on the familiarity side. While I want students to be engaged and feel connected to history, I also want them to understand the distance and differences that allows for critical examination and coming to their own understandings.

What then are the alternatives? In “Why Won’t You Just Tell Us the Answer?”  Bruce Lesh found an alternative in helping his students create their own chronology of a historical event. This historical thinking tool exposes students to how narratives come to exist, and helps them to think critically about the narratives they are exposed to. As Lesh wrote on page 90, “chronology, when developed by historians, is not simply placing documents in chronological order, but making determinations about the relationships among information contained within a historical source and then using that information to craft an accurate telling of the event.” His activity helps students see that historians decide the order of events, what to include, and how this shapes the story that students then see and learn from (Barton and Levstick, p. 131). This is a skill that will help students interpret current events, and look critically at the stories they encounter outside of the classroom.

There are other ways of solving the narrative “problem,” both through historical thinking activities like Lesh’s as well as through presenting alternative narratives to students. While it can be a polarizing source, resources like the Zinn education project http://zinnedproject.org/ provide teachers with access to alternative narratives and can help them think of different ways of presenting history or different stories to tell. I still like the use of narratives, I think they have a use, and that getting students to be engaged and feel connected to history should not be overlooked. However, an awareness of the narratives being used, who relates to the, and what they say about history is important not only for teachers, but for students as well.