Elevator+Caroline+and+Kelly

We need a new way to teach young people how to evaluate news. Let's use the historical inquiry model -- news as an account vs. news as an event. Let's teach students a framework for evaluating how news reports are a construction reflecting specific biases, contexts, cultural values, and curated evidence -- not an ultimate truth.

Young people have a natural curiosity and critical ability, but we need to give them the language to talk about media accounts by revealing how they are constructed -- let's reveal the process of how media accounts are produced in order to show that they're not monolithic truths but rather accounts that can be critiqued and evaluated. These skills have crossover to other realms, where students as budding scholars will need to evaluate produced accounts by other writers and thinkers. Ultimately, these skills will help shape citizens who know how to evaluate and find information beyond the major channels that may drown out other voices.

Let's use the recent return to traditional skills of rhetoric, argument, and journalism outlined in Common Core to lead a push for teaching media as a critical framework for understanding how we as a culture tell stories about our world and about current events. This approach would integrate hands-on literacy skills in producing news with reflective and evaluative frameworks via critical media theory taught in middle school and high school. The ability to read and think critically will form a bridge to college readiness and develop strong habits of mind for life beyond schooling.