Chapter 10

Teaching and Learning Mediactivity We run all kinds of deficits in our society. We spend money we don’t have, at every level of society, sinking ourselves into perhaps unpayable debt for the long run. We invest too little and speculate too much, and our political class caters to a national refusal to face up to long-term realities. We’ve been running a similar deficit in critical thinking. We regiment children instead of helping them to be creative, teaching them to take standardized tests instead of helping them think for themselves. In too many school districts, teaching critical thinking would be denounced as a dangerous experiment. It’s not dangerous at all. It’s entirely American to challenge authority. But skepticism shouldn’t become pure cynicism that we drape over everything we see. It should motivate us to seek out the best evidence, and learn from what we discover. We need to teach our kids how to be mediactive in a mediasaturated world. But they’re not the only ones who need instruction; adults who are not digital natives have plenty to learn, while modern youths who think they know the media terrain often can’t (or don’t bother to) distinguish different levels of trustworthy information in the midst of their forum-hopping. For all of us, no matter our age, mediactivity is a lifetime practice, a collection of principles and skills that we keep learning and tweaking, in part because technology and our societal norms have a way of changing, too. Why should we do this? Because democratized media is part of democracy, and democracy is about more than simply voting. It is about participation as citizens. Participating in media is a step toward being participants in a broader way, which works, in the end, only when we know what we’re talking about; citizenship is not an exercise in demagoguery with your neighbors as props, but rather is about persuading and working with them—and perhaps being persuaded by them. Those deeply committed to mediactivism will not only consume news wisely and create materials that help their communities, but will 146 Mediactive always be on the lookout for ways to help others become mediactive and sharpen their own skills. Media Literacy I’ve avoided the expression “media literacy” in this book for one major reason: It feels like terminology from an older era, and what media literacy has meant in the past doesn’t map so well to the future. Yet the fundamental concept remains valuable, even if it needs updating. When I said this in a blog posting in late 2008, I got some pushback from one of the leaders in the field, Renee Hobbs, a professor at Temple University and head of the school’s exemplary Media Education Lab. When I referred to media literacy—as an expression, as opposed to a concept—as “quaint to the point of irrelevance,” she chided me (fairly) for dissing my allies, adding: We’ve been debating terms for this concept for 15 years. Everybody and his brother has a different name for it: “digital literacy,” “information literacy” and “cyberliteracy” just to name a few. Thanks for at least using the right term: media literacy. Participation is by definition and tradition a vital part of any literacy; yet for me the term “media literacy” has taken on connotations mostly of smarter consumption. So the reason I look for new language is to emphasize the participation that’s now so integral to media in a grassroots-enabled world. Technology—the Internet, blogs and microblogging, digital photography and video, high-speed networks and more—has changed the media landscape radically in recent years. And we’ve adopted technology at an amazing pace. From all over the landscape, people once relegated to observing from their couches have flocked to the new media, and these days the asides and comments of friends, followers and the followed often turn out to be just as important as the reports from professional journalists. Whatever we call it, we agree that an active approach to reading the news is essential. Media literacy has had several major threads over the past century. One is academic: the creation of an almost institutional system based on research and school-based instruction. Another has roots in political activism. Both of these threads—and a host of related ideas, such as “digital citizenship” and “critical literacy,” to mention just two of the many competing expressions in the field—are a good starting point for more contemporary efforts. Dan Gillmor 147 Until recently, many activists in the media literacy movement, notably the left-of-center folks, were somewhat preoccupied with the still-real dangers of corporate media consolidation. Media critics and reformers on the political left and right have found too little common ground. One of the few places they have started to collaborate is network neutrality, which activists on many sides have finally realized is key to their own futures—though here we find a tendency of people on the right to favor corporate interests ahead of the public interest. Media literacy advocates of all stripes, inside and outside academia, have moved toward participation. We all need to push this much further. Mediactivism is, above all, about doing things: action and participation. That won’t end what Hobbs and Amy Jensen of Brigham Young University described, in the Journal of Media Literacy Education, as “tensions between educators, activists, artists, civic, political, governmental, media, and business leaders regarding the differing roles and functions” of media literacy education. But I especially like the way the researchers I’ve cited celebrate the complexity—created by the various social and political perspectives they see—of what they call our “journey to empowerment.” Empowerment takes more than mere knowledge; we need to translate what we know into action. Whether we call it media literacy, news literacy, mediactivism or anything else, above all, we need to push participation, not as a chore but as something satisfying and vital. We Teach, We Learn, We Do We can’t act, however, until we understand why we should, and how. Who should lead in the lifelong mediactivity process of learning and participation? Everyone, really. Anyone lucky enough to have the access we all have to the world’s best ideas and knowledge, plus the education to understand and talk coherently about them, can reach out to others. The primary guides to critical thinking should be the ones you’d expect—parents, friends, schools and institutions devoted to learning outside of the education system—plus perhaps one group you might not expect. That’s the journalists themselves, who should have been among the leading proponents of these skills and principles but, for the most part, haven’t bothered. 148 Mediactive Schools Media literacy’s rise in American education has long roots. Some scholars credit in particular the work of a Jesuit priest, the late John Culkin (1928–1993). Founder of the now-defunct Center for Understanding Media, based in New York, Culkin wanted teachers to think in ways they hadn’t contemplated before. In a biographical essay, Kate Moody, one of the early practitioners of Culkin’s notions, wrote: He believed that if teachers understood the function of media in culture, they could use that awareness to help young people become better learners. By the late 1960s there was more information outside the classroom than in it, due to the pervasiveness of film and TV. Much of the information was really misinformation, so that “separating the signal from the noise” became a necessary task. It was important for educators to grapple with this disparity between information levels outside and inside the school. That meant dealing with the full spectrum of materials to which pupils were exposed outside and to help them deal with it critically and reflectively, rather than with the passivity that had come to be associated with habitual TV viewing. Culkin and his allies pushed hard to incorporate media skills and understanding into the curriculum. They had some success over the past half-century; media literacy has become a widely known concept, practiced in some schools and promoted by a variety of people and organizations worried about mass media’s influence. In recent years their successors have looked at the digital sphere and realized they had to confront new and even more difficult issues— especially the diffusion of sources beyond what once had been a relatively few mass media organizations. Where television was once the major concern, now we have to understand digital media and incorporate them into a much more complex equation. According to Hobbs, to the extent that media literacy is taught in the K–12 environment, it tends to be integrated into specific subject areas—health, for example—and mostly in middle schools. Statistics are thin on its penetration in America’s classrooms; Hobbs doubts that even 30 percent of U.S. students are exposed to it in any formal way. But she’s certain, based on her own observations and the publishing of more dissertations on the topic, that interest is growing. Dan Gillmor 149 There’s no national curriculum or standardized lesson plans in the area of media literacy—and for good reason, Hobbs says. U.S. public education is decentralized, and media are changing so fast that wise teachers need to constantly update what they’re teaching. Further diminishing the possibility of standards, according to Hobbs, is that the best teachers are incorporating media-creation skills, not just tips on smarter consumption, into their offerings. Can schools ever be the most important place for media literacy education? I have my doubts, in part because this is so much about teaching kids to be critical thinkers. Look around, and consider the political climate. I’ll say it again: In many parts of America, a teacher who tried to do this would be branded as a dangerous radical. Some media literacy advocates have all but given up on schools. Hobbs definitely hasn’t. She told me: I have a lot of respect for teachers. Schools can be repressive. They’re designed to be culturally conservative. Yet good teachers, who are everywhere, know that learning happens only when you make a connection between the learner and the competencies. Sidebar: danah boyd on Teachers and Media Literacy Social media researcher danah boyd, who served on the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, has been studying young people’s adoption of digital media. Her perspective on media literacy and schools is cogent. As she told me: I sit down with teachers in this country and my heart breaks for them, because they’ve gotten to a world where they have so many standards that they have to measure up to, where they don’t feel like they’re teachers anymore. They don’t feel like they’re actually teaching kids to think. And many of them want to teach kids to think. They may or may not have the skills to do so, and that’s a whole separate ball of wax. But a lot of them really want to give young people the skills, which include critical thinking, to move forward as adults. They want to teach them how to think about the world at large… 150 Mediactive English education used to be a core place of critical thinking. Read To Kill a Mockingbird and start deconstructing it. Now it’s like, “Can you prove that you remember the following seven things from the book?” Some of the hardest [teaching] jobs these days are trying to teach the most privileged kids in this country, because a lot of those teachers want to push back at the expectations that the kids bring into the classroom. But that unfortunately means pushing back at the expectations of the parents. And that’s a lot harder. And that’s actually a space where I worry much more for engaging in destructive activities. I actually think there’s a lot more opportunity though for kids who are traditionally underprivileged to really be given critical thinking skills that will help them in the workforce and as they go forward. So if we just start with the underprivileged kids, I’m okay with that. Parents Teachers in schools can only go so far. Parents are the first educators of children in any case, and raising children for the world we will live in will surely mean helping them become adaptable in their intellectual habits. The Internet has been a boon for parents looking for help. You can find any number of excellent online resources for helping your children understand media. The PBS Parents website, for example, has a thorough archive of articles, videos and more on the topic. (And, as usual, we’ll point to a bunch of others on the Mediactive website, mediactive.com.) But I also want to make a different kind of pitch to parents. As I’ve said again and again, tactics mean nothing without principles. Teach your kids skepticism, honesty, zeal to find the truth and the other principles in this book, and they’ll find the rest of what they need naturally. Friends and Colleagues Remember the email I quoted in Chapter 1? It was an email forwarded from a colleague of mine, one of many such missives his father regularly sends him, informing the reader of several fairly amazing “facts” regarding America, Osama bin Laden and the September 11 attacks. My colleague wrote that he didn’t have time to check further, though he was appropriately skeptical. I did visit Snopes.com to check it Dan Gillmor 151 out, and learned that the email was a twisted series of lies, cloaked in some actual events that gave the lies a patina of reality. It was plainly designed to inflame, not inform. The charges, which I won’t detail again, have been making their way around the Net for some time. There’s no doubt that lots of its intended readers believe every word, because they want to. How should we respond when friends and colleagues forward such things? I believe we all have a duty to do more than simply shrug and delete them. At the very least I’d urge a friend who forwarded me a note like this to be skeptical and check it out, and I’d also encourage him to tell whoever sent it to him to do the same. In this case I let my colleague know what I’d found, and I hope he let his father know. Whether it went back beyond that, I’ll never know—but it should have. We have a special duty to tell people we’ve been wrong when we give them information that turns out to be false. They’ll appreciate the correction, and trust us more in the end. Journalists In June 2009, the New Yorker ran a story about America’s healthcare crisis. The reporter, Atul Gawande, did something remarkable. He’d discovered dramatic differences between health-care costs in two U.S. communities, and he sought to explain why one place spent vastly more per capita than the other, yet had a significantly poorer overall health record. His article was, in part, an explanation of how he had done the journalistic detective work to figure out the reasons. A little over a year earlier, National Public Radio had run a lengthy story called “Giant Pool of Money”—a program that asked the question too few journalists had been asking in previous years: namely, how it was that so many people who couldn’t afford to make home-mortgage payments were getting the loans anyway. It was a masterpiece of investigative and explanatory journalism, and an essential part of the report was the explanation of how the journalists had discovered the information. Early in the show, co-reporter Alex Blumberg told listeners part of his thought process as he gathered information for the story: The thing that got me interested in all this was something called a NINA loan. Back when the housing crisis was still a housing bubble. A guy on the phone told me that a NINA loan stands for No Income, No Asset, as in, someone will lend you a bunch of money without first checking if you have any income or any assets. And it was an official, loan product. 152 Mediactive Like, you could walk into a mortgage broker’s office and they would say, well, we can give you a 30-year fixed rate, or we could put you in a NINA. He said there were lots of loans like this, where the bank didn’t actually check your income, which I found confusing. It turns out even the people who got them found them confusing. Both the NPR and the New Yorker pieces were examples of something that’s been largely absent from the journalism craft, to its detriment: a recognition that media has a role in helping people develop critical thinking skills, and that journalists—explaining what they do and why—can be among the best teachers. Traditional media have done a generally lousy job of this. They’ve been content to produce their products and (at least until recently) rake in the money, without much concern for helping audiences understand what journalists actually do when they do their jobs well. I’m not talking here about gratuitous bragging, especially when there’s little to brag about (which is all too often the case). But the better a news organization does its job in solid or superlative ways, the more important it may be to let the audience in on the hows and whys. The result might include more support and funds from the community for professional journalists. But for the future of journalism, the more important outcome would be a greater appreciation of why everybody needs to do this work. Brent Cunningham, in an article that originally appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, offered sound advice: [J]ournalism would need to begin to change the narrative about itself. It is a narrative that has been created by the press’s own failures, its arrogance and shortsightedness, but also by a forty-year campaign by segments of the political right to vilify the press as a “liberal” cabal, and a more recent and less coordinated effort by elements on the left to portray it as a corporate stooge. Changing this narrative will not be easy. There is considerable hostility and distrust toward the mainstream news media, but some of it is the result of ignorance about what the press does and why. The partisan press-haters will always be with us, but the nascent News Literacy movement is attempting to rectify the pervasive ignorance about the values and methods of journalism—to instill in young citizens the importance of the best kinds of journalism, and how to distinguish it from the less-reliable, Dan Gillmor 153 less-intellectually honest stuff that floods our information environment each day. The “news literacy” genre, as noted by Cunningham, is indeed nascent, but it’s growing in smart ways. One good example is the News Literacy Project, founded by Alan Miller, a former Los Angeles Times journalist. It brings working reporters and editors into schools to help students understand the (best) values of journalism, and put those values into practice. This kind of thing should be routine, not a brave new experiment. Media Skills and Civic Engagement Some of the most promising work in mediactivsm has come via the Internet, using traditional and new institutions in wonderfully creative ways. No one knows more about the intersection of old and new than Henry Jenkins. An author and professor, Jenkins ran the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to the University of Southern California, where he is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts. For decades he’s been working on understanding the changes in media, and how they can spur civic engagement. He celebrates, among other developments, the fan clubs and comment sites that have sprung up around movies, television shows and pop musicians. He sees them as forms of social expression just as legitimate as conventional political commentary—and, moreover, as a bridge to greater political involvement. We’ve moved ahead, Jenkins says, but not nearly far enough, “especially when we’re talking about the educational culture, which is remarkably resistant to technology, resistant to new methods, and certainly resistant to ideas of critical citizenship.” In a conversation, he continued: We know we’ve lost ground in terms of civics, instruction through schools, in terms of the ability of school newspapers to investigate and publish information, in terms of classroom discussions of public policy issues. Teachers are often straightjacketed and schools and students certainly are, where we’re seeing bans on social network sites, on YouTube, all of the tools and platforms that are being used outside of school to foster a more participatory culture…. 154 Mediactive [Yet] if you go outside of school, if we look at the studies that are done pretty regularly by the Pew Center for Internet and American Life, they’re finding 60–65% of American young people have produced media. A high percentage of American teens are involved in publishing some kind of blog or live journal online or participating in online forums…. Those kids who participate actively in game guilds and social networks and in networks in general are more likely to take the next step and be involved with the political activities of their local or national community. There is a direct connection that we’re starting to identify between participation in these kinds of cultural forums and participation in civic forums. So outside of school we’re seeing dramatic gains. Inside of school, there’s a kind of no-fly zone that’s preventing people from being able to fully engage with these new practices. My father used to say, never let schooling get in the way of your education. And this may be one of those contexts where schools are getting in the way, in many cases, rather than facilitating the acquisition of the kind of citizenship skills that you and I are interested in. Jenkins, through his own work and observations of other efforts, points to a host of intriguing projects, some organized and some organic—and most taking place outside the formal education system. Global Kids, based in New York, has done what its name suggests: bringing children from around the world together, in mostly virtual ways, to understand public policy at the local level, but in a global context. He also points to the Harry Potter Alliance, which comes out of the “fandom” arena: fans of cultural works who discuss those works and, at some point, start collaborating on their own, using the skills they’ve developed as fans and applying them in wider realms, including the news. Harry Potter challenges authority. As Jenkins explains, Harry Potter’s Alliance fans have “gone and said, ‘Okay, what would Dumbledore’s Army do in our time? Where is evil? What change can we bring about?’ So they’ve got 50 chapters worldwide, 100,000 young people involved in struggles over human rights issues, both abroad and in the United States.” This is exciting stuff. Dan Gillmor 155 Journalism Education’s Opportunity Accepting an award from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication in 2008, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably “the best general education that an American citizen can get” today. Perhaps he was playing to his audience, at least to a degree. Many other kinds of undergraduate degree programs could lay claim to a similar value; a strong liberal arts degree, no matter what the major, has great merit. Still, there’s no doubt that a journalism degree, done right, is an excellent foundation for a student’s future in any field, not just media. Even if McNeil overstated the case, his words should inspire journalism educators to ponder their role in a world where these programs’ traditional reason for being is increasingly murky. Our raison d’etre is open to question largely because the employment pipeline of the past, a progression leading from school to jobs in media and related industries, is (at best) in jeopardy. We’re still turning out young graduates who go off to work in entry-level jobs, particularly in broadcasting—but where is their career path from there? If traditional media have adapted fitfully to the collision of technology and media, journalism schools as a group may have been even slower to react to the huge shifts in the craft and its business practices. Only recently have they embraced digital technologies in their work with students who plan to enter traditional media. Too few are helping students understand that they may well have to invent their own jobs, much less helping them do so. Yet journalism education could and should have a long and even prosperous life ahead—if its practitioners make some fundamental shifts, recognizing the realities of the 21st century. In Chapter 8 I told you how I’d run a news organization. If I ran a journalism school, I would start with the same basic principles of honorable, high-quality journalism and mediactivism, and embed them at the core of everything else. If our students didn’t understand and appreciate them, nothing else we did would matter very much. With the principles as the foundation, we would, among many other things (the full list is on mediactive.com): 156 Mediactive  Emphasize undergraduate journalism degrees as great liberal arts programs, perhaps even more valuable when viewed that way than as training for journalism careers. At the same time, we would focus graduate journalism studies on helping people with expertise in specific areas to be the best possible journalists in their fields.  Encourage, and require in some cases, cross-disciplinary learning and doing. We’d create partnerships around the university, working with business, engineering/computer science, film, political science, law, design and many other programs. The goals would be both to develop our own projects and to be an essential community-wide resource for the future of local media.  Teach students not just the basics of digital media but also the value of data and programming to their future work. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to become programmers, but they absolutely need to know how to communicate with programmers. We’d also encourage computer science undergraduates to become journalism graduate students, so they can help create tomorrow’s media.  Require all students to learn basic statistics, survey research and fundamental scientific methodology. The inability of journalists to understand the math they encounter in their reading is one of journalism’s—and society’s—major flaws.  Encourage a research agenda with deep connections to key media issues of today. More than ever, we need solid data and rigorous analysis. And translate faculty research into language average people can understand as opposed to the dense, even impenetrable, prose that’s clear (if it really is) only to readers of academic journals.  Require all journalism students to understand business concepts, especially those relating to media. This is not just to cure the longstanding ignorance of business issues in the craft, but also to recognize that today’s students will be among the people who develop tomorrow’s journalism business models. We’d discuss for-profit and not-for-profit methods, and look at advertising, marketing, social networking, and search-engine optimization, among many other elements. Dan Gillmor 157  Make entrepreneurship a core part of journalism education. Arizona State University, where I work, is among several schools working on this, and the early experiments are gratifying. Several of our student projects have won funding. At City University of New York, Jeff Jarvis has received foundation funding for student projects to continue after the class is over, based on semester-ending competitive “pitches” to a judging panel of journalists and investors. We need to see more and more of these and other kinds of experiments.  Persuade the president (or chancellor, or whatever the title) and trustees of the university that every student on the campus should learn journalism principles and skills before graduating, preferably during freshman year. At State University of New York’s Stony Brook campus, the journalism school has been given a special mandate of exactly this kind. Howard Schneider, a former newspaper journalist who now is dean of Stony Brook’s journalism school, won foundation funding to bring news literacy into the university’s broader community, rather than only to those enrolled in journalism courses.  Create a program of the same kind for people in the community, starting with teachers. Our goal would be to help schools across our geographical area bring mediactivism to every level of education—not just college, but also elementary, middle and high school. We would offer workshops, conferences and online training.  Offer that program, or one like it, to concerned parents who feel overwhelmed by the media deluge themselves, to help turn them into better media consumers and to give them ways to help their children.  Enlist another vital player in this effort: local media of all kinds, not just traditional media. Of course, as noted earlier, they should be making this a core part of their missions, given that their own credibility would rise if they helped people understand the principles and process of quality journalism. But we’d very much want to work with local new media organizations and individuals, too.  Advise and train citizen journalists to understand and apply sound principles and best practices. They are going to be an 158 Mediactive essential part of the local journalism ecosystem, and we should reach out to show them how we can help.  Augment local media with our own journalism. We train students to do journalism, after all, and their work should be widely available in the community, particularly when it fills in gaps left by the shrinking traditional media. At Arizona State, the Cronkite News Service provides all kinds of coverage of topics the local news organizations rarely cover, making our students’ work available to those organizations. All this suggests a considerably broader mission for journalism schools and programs than the one they’ve had in the past. It also suggests a huge opportunity for journalism schools. The need for this kind of training has never been greater. We’re not the only ones who can do it, but we may be among the best equipped. It’s Everyone’s Job I hope we can all be learners, teachers and actors in mediactivism. The alternatives are a bit scary. But to get to where we need to be, we also need better tools and techniques. In the next chapter we’ll look at some of the possibilities.

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