News literacy and fake news curriculum: School librarians’ perceptions of pedagogical practices

Abstract

The high profile of fake news reveals underlying trends in the production and consumption of news. While news literacy is a lifelong skill, the logical time to start teaching such literacy is in K-12 educational settings, so that all people have the opportunity to learn and practice news literacy. School librarians can play a critical role in helping students gain news literacy competence. This study investigated the needs for K-12 students to be news literate and their current level of skills as perceived by in-service teachers and school librarians in California. Respondents thought that their students were most competent at distinguishing advertisements and least proficient at discerning the trustworthiness of photographs. Concurrently, news literacy was seldom integrated systematically into the curriculum. The findings supported the need for developing news media literacy curriculum, including visual and media literacy, that could be implemented by K-12 teachers and school librarians.

Literacy Education in the Post-Truth Era: The Pedagogical Potential of Multiliteracies

“…Evolving conceptions of literacy have focused on the pedagogical potential for multiliteracies (Hibbert, 2013), critical literacies (Asher Golden & Zacher Pandya, 2019;Bonsor-Kurki, 2015), and digital literacies (Martin, 2008;Prinsloo & Rowsell, 2012). While the emergence of "fake news" into the sociocultural lexicon has propelled researchers to investigate pedagogy of information literacy (Cherner & Curry, 2019;Farmer, 2019;Frechette, 2019), more research is needed to explore how young people make meaning while navigating the new information environment. Our study reveals that while students think they are able to navigate digital information environments independently, their practices lack consistent criticality.…”

Combating misinformation: The effects of infographics in verifying false vaccine news

“…As stated before, infographics can be utilised to better communicate principles of news literacy by combining visual and text messages (Farmer, 2019; Lester, 2013). An individual’s confidence in their ability, or in this case their perceived news literacy, can be different from actual ability.…”

Rapid shifts in educators’ perceptions of data literacy priorities

“…Beyond school, the nature of data is changing as cheap storage, the Internet of Things, and online tracking tools make it possible to near-instantly compile, analyze, and act on large volumes of data. While much of the early research in these areas was optimistic, the 2016 surprise election result in the United States, and the later revelation of the degree to which voters may have been manipulated based on their social media data, fueled a rapid surge in discussion of "fake news" and the need for students to be able to discern and critically understand information in various formats (e.g., Farmer, 2019;Stanford History Education Group, 2016). Educators and the broader society quickly recognized that students needed more savvy about how data was guiding, tracking, and sometimes weaponizing their daily moves.…”