Daily Herald opinion: Another survey shows shortcomings in rollout of media literacy instruction
Understanding media is one of the most valuable and practical abilities students today need to learn.
Critical-thinking skills have always been important for evaluating the accuracy and the import of information we learn from media. The advent of social media, a much more broadly varied news media environment online and, now, artificial intelligence influences have magnified the value of those skills exponentially. It is now harder and more complex than ever to know what information you can trust or how to verify the information you see, hear, read and text.
That’s why it was so important when in 2021, Illinois became the first state in the union to pass a law requiring schools to build media literacy into their K-12 curriculums — and so disappointing when, two years later, a Northern Illinois News Association survey found implementation of the law was spotty across the state, with educators at some schools even unaware of the requirement.
At the time, it was natural to hope that schools just hadn’t had time yet to create sophisticated instruction plans. Two more years later, however, the shortcomings of that hope are becoming ever clearer.
Last week, Capitol News Illinois reported on a broad new study by the University of Illinois Springfield that reinforced NINA’s results and expanded on them. One of the most striking lessons of the UIS study was the vast disparity among schools in the subject matter taught and the time spent reviewing it.
Just under a third of respondents — 29% — reported they spend more than three weeks worth of class periods on the topic. But another third indicated they spend between an hour and a week of class time on it, and 16% said they discuss media literacy during a single class period out of the entire school year.
Among other findings:
- Less than 82% of teachers said high school freshmen received media literacy instruction at their schools.
- The amount of the training decreases as students get older. Seniors received it at 63% of the schools.
- One-third of teachers said their students will see just one lesson over their four years in high school.
Researchers and media literacy experts identify some key weaknesses in Illinois’ approach. No clear guidelines are provided as a foundation for learning. Teachers get little to no training in the subject matter, and have few classroom materials to help with instruction. Moreover, the law requires only that schools provide at least one “unit” of instruction per year, but it doesn’t describe what qualifies as a unit.
Thus, schools are left to their own devices to determine how to integrate media literacy into class curriculums and how much emphasis to put on it. As the NINA and UIS reports show, that is not a satisfactory strategy for ensuring that Illinoisans learn from an early age the skills of identifying reliable information and the ways to use it.
Some skeptics fear more specific guidelines for teaching media literacy will lead to indoctrination or the skewing of instruction about reliability along social or political lines. But, properly managed, teaching media literacy has the precise opposite goal.
“(The aim of) real media literacy,” said Yonty Friesem, an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago and a co-founder of Illinois Media Literacy Coalition, “ … is to learn to ask questions. So, it’s not about if you’re conservative or liberal; you’re media literate or you’re not media literate.”
And being media literate goes beyond simply knowing how to find fact-checking websites. It involves understanding how to search for information and then analyze and evaluate the information you find. It involves recognizing the emotional appeal of certain types of messages and how to base discussions on facts and reason.
In that regard, the UIS survey offers some encouraging signs, with substantial numbers of respondents saying media literacy components are integrated in some fashion into fields as diverse as English, history, business, civics and more.
So, we have something to build on. But we clearly have a lot of building still to do.
From the neighborhood level to the scope of geopolitics, effective democracy runs on mutual trust. People don’t have to agree with each other on every issue, but they do have to know when they are being manipulated and how to find the most relevant and reliable information on the issues they care about. Illinois schools should be looking for and finding more consistent ways to build those skills, and the General Assembly and state Board of Education should be doing more to help them.