Since 2004, Timothy Krueger has taught history to younger teenagers in the North Syracuse district in upstate New York. His students once raised a bogus TikTok conspiracy theory that Helen Keller faked her blindness and deafness. Others had said they were unvaccinated against Covid-19 because their parents had told them, inaccurately, that the shot would make them infertile.
Mr. Krueger began including more lessons about evaluating evidence and fact-checking. In November, a pilot program he helped design with the American Federation of Teachers will be piloted in Cleveland, helping in part to train educators to teach media and information literacy using “safe” methods to shield them from harassment.
“We’re under attack — it’s now such an openly polarized society, where teachers are afraid to talk about hot topics or controversial issues,” Mr. Krueger said.
But, he added, teachers are “Step 1” in showing young people how to think clearly for themselves: “If we want them to be a truly intelligent constituency, we have to start now.”
New educational efforts are constantly being deployed. Twitter and Google have so-called pre-bunking initiatives to warn users about common misinformation tactics. The nonprofit News Literacy Project, which said the number of students using its free Checkology curriculum surged 248 percent between 2018 and 2022, recently introduced a short elections misinformation guide on Flip, a video-based online platform for teachers.
But Peter Adams, a former teacher who heads research and design for the News Literacy Project, is pushing for a broader consensus on the types of skills students should learn and the results educators want. Without it, he worries that lessons could backfire.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/technology/misinformation-students-media-literacy.html
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