Throughout history, education has emphasized the teaching of essential knowledge. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1817 that democracy requires an informed and literate citizenship (Arthur, Davies, & Hahn, 2008). At the founding of our nation, the men who put into practice our new form of government recognized the role of literacy in democracy. They discussed the importance of public education for American citizens—at that time, though, they were referring exclusively to white males. In the early years of our democracy, newspapers became the primary means of mass communication and knowledge, particularly about political issues.
Fast forward to current times, where, with the growth of the internet and now AI, we are inundated by a deluge of information—some accurate, some false, some misleading, but all coming from particular perspectives and biases. Many students (and adults) struggle to analyze and evaluate the mediated communication that inundates our worlds and to reflect on how their identities shape their understanding of truth. Habits of critical thinking about media messages must become integrated across our curriculum for all students if we are to fulfill the promise of true democracy.
By regularly incorporating questions about the constructed nature of media messages, we give students habits needed for citizenship in the modern day.
We need to equip our students with the skills and habits needed for citizenship in a communications ecology dominated by social media, algorithmic manipulation, deep and shallow fakes, and partisan political propaganda. We need a shift in our pedagogy from filling students up with knowledge to teaching them to analyze, evaluate, and reflect on their understanding of knowledge. This shift is necessitated by changes in our media landscape, particularly with respect to politics and news.
Misinformation Overload
The way U.S. citizens consumed and thought about news media has swung back and forth throughout the decades. In the 1850s, for example, 80 percent of newspapers were partisan, often created and run by political parties (Starr, 2004). For readers of that time, news was assumed to reflect a partisan editorial perspective.
The public’s expectations for news coverage changed with the advent of nationwide mass media—television news—which promoted “objective” journalism. Walter Cronkite’s daily sign-off on the CBS Evening News, with his catch phrase “And that’s the way it is . . .”, reflected the public understanding at the time that true journalism was unbiased. The major networks, in fierce competition to capture the vast political center of American viewership, helped to unify public opinion and delegitimize non-mainstream views.
This began to change yet again with the rise of cable television in the 1980s. And then came the internet. As viewers were channeled into echo chambers and filter bubbles that reinforced narrow views, “news” outlets began to perpetuate highly partisan and often false information.
We have largely moved back to an era of partisan coverage, but students are not prepared to think critically about the biases in their news (and other information) nor to reflect on how their own thinking may limit their understanding of the truth. This infodemic of mis-, dis-, and malinformation overload requires that schools better integrate critical thinking about the biases in media messages throughout the curriculum.
In 2017, researchers Joseph Kahne and Benjamin Bowyer studied how media literacy initiatives can help high school students accurately assess truth claims in news. One significant finding was that students with high levels of political knowledge and interest were no better at assessing what was true and false in the news than their peers with little knowledge or interest in politics. The "motivated reasoners” used their superior knowledge to argue for claims that supported their biases and discredited opposing views and sources. The research suggests that knowledge and motivation alone are not enough to armor our students against the appeals of false or misleading information, particularly in the face of media-propelled confirmation biases.
Kahne and Bowyer went on to study the effectiveness of media literacy initiatives in addressing these concerns. What they found has important implications for the crafting of a pedagogy and methodologies for helping students navigate today’s complex media environment. They identified three qualities of media literacy initiatives that taught students to more accurately assess truth claims in the news. They found students needed to:
- Analyze and evaluate diverse and conflicting claims.
- Take and defend their own positions—with evidence.
- Reflect on their own thinking—particularly their confirmation biases.
While most U.S. schools have students practice the first two skills, particularly at the secondary level and in specific subject areas such as social studies, the same is not true for the third skill—teaching students to be metacognitive. For habits of reflection, analysis, and evaluation to become routine for students for all the media messages they see, share, and create, teachers must integrate habits of questioning throughout the curriculum.
Decoding Media, Across the Curriculum
Since 1996, Project Look Sharp, a not-for-profit media literacy initiative at Ithaca College that I co-direct, has helped K–12 educators develop resources and approaches for integrating critical thinking about media into the teaching of their core content. Project Look Sharp provides educators with more than 875 free media-decoding lessons tied to diverse subject areas and all grade levels. Each lesson includes the media documents needed for the decoding—short video clips, website excerpts, book covers, paintings, posters, songs, social media posts, and more. The lessons are also linked to state academic standards and objectives and include questions that address core subject-area knowledge and media literacy (see “Sample Questions for Media Decoding”).
By regularly incorporating questions about the constructed nature of media messages, including their purpose, sourcing, credibility, impact, and our own interpretations, educators can give students habits needed for citizenship in the modern day.
Not long after publishing our first lessons, we saw that teachers often used our inquiry-based lessons to provide students with their teacherly analysis, rather than facilitating projects in which students do their own analysis and teach each other. This led us to codify the classroom methodology we call Constructivist Media Decoding. CMD teaches teachers to integrate critical questioning about media with their students that: (1) supports core content instruction; (2) is inquiry-based and student-centered; (3) is flexible in its use; (4) makes the learning process more engaging, collaborative, and fun for all students; and (5) teaches educators to listen well to how their students understand the information, the concepts, and the learning being addressed.
CMD trains educators to carefully choose media documents and key questions that relate to the learning objectives for that activity, and then ask students to thoughtfully defend and expand upon their responses to these media documents by:
- Providing document-based evidence (Where do you see that?)
- Teaching each other (Say more about that.)
- Exploring different views (Does everyone agree?)
- Asking their own questions (What questions do you have about ___?)
- Answering their own questions (How could we find that out?)
- Synthesizing their learning (What does this teach us about ___?)
The CMD approach has proven to be particularly effective in bringing challenging topics into the classroom, such as climate change, vaccines, race, and contemporary politics. In turn, teachers learn to lead media decoding in a way that focuses the analysis on student thinking and collective learning rather than the voice and views of the teacher. In this way, CMD trains educators in a constructivist methodology that builds student voice and agency and centers teaching on student learning, rather than just “covering the content.” Here are a few examples:
For an early elementary lesson on emotions, a teacher shows four short versions of the introduction to the movie The Lion King with different music under each. The teacher asks students to talk about the emotions that each one evokes and why that might be, probing for understanding (e.g., Why might you feel that way?). Students listen to each other put words to different emotions, learn that music can provoke feelings, and begin to realize that not everyone has the same reaction.
Another lesson for middle schoolers has students analyze depictions from 1892, 1992, and 2015 of Christopher Columbus and his first contact with Indigenous people. The teacher asks questions about each representation (What are the messages here about Columbus, about the Taino people?), with follow-up probing for document-based evidence (Where do you see that?). This can be an opportunity to teach about historical context (Why might the messages have changed over time?), with probing by the teacher to have students clarify their reasoning (Why do you think that?) and teach their peers.
At the high school level, one health and science lesson asks students to analyze four short TikTok videos that make health claims. The teacher asks questions about content (What are the messages here about ___?), about technique (How do they try to convince the viewer?), about purpose (Who made this and why?), about credibility (How could we assess the validity of this claim?), and about the students’ own thinking (Which message might you click and why?).
In all these examples, the teacher chooses the documents and the questions and probes student responses to address their lesson objectives and learning standards. But the students do the work of analyzing, evaluating, and reflecting. (See below for more lesson examples.)
“Deepfakes” and the Need for Habits of Metacognition
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies necessitates that we prepare our students to habitually ask key critical thinking questions about all mediated messages and about their own thinking. One media-decoding lesson we provide is looking at “deepfakes”—intentionally manipulated still or video images that are created using “deep” (often AI) generative methods. Students evaluate images and videos from the internet as fake or true and reflect on how confirmation bias can impact their judgment. After looking at a series of images or videos from social media or other websites, teachers ask students questions including:
- Is this a “deepfake” or not? Why?
- How can you research if it is true or not?
- How might your confirmation bias impact your thinking and your sharing?
These kinds of questions build students’ habits of metacognition—that third essential skill that Kahne and Bowyer identified—throughout the curriculum in a way that supports core subject-area instruction, that more effectively reaches all students, and that prepares them for life in our hypermediated world.
We need to make media literacy education an essential part of school curriculum—for the sake of our democracy.
However, this approach requires a shift in how teachers often use media in the classroom. They must move from a strictly informational approach (What did the video say about ___?) to incorporating appropriate media literacy questions about purpose, credibility, interpretations, and other aspects. Of course, these key questions will need to evolve over time as new technologies require new questions. But developing habits of inquiry about the purpose, credibility, and interpretations of mediated messages will help prepare students for a future with new media technologies that we have yet to conceptualize.
Our country was built on a belief that well-reasoned thought and action by all citizens can best steward society toward a just and successful future. Public education is a cornerstone of that belief. We need to make media literacy education an essential part of school curriculum—not just for the sake of our students and their future success, but for the sake of our democracy.
Teaching Students to Decode the World
Lead students through a question-based analysis of media materials with an emphasis on critical thinking and collaboration.
