This week's readings and podcast helps me understand more fully how as a school librarian, it is my job to teach students how approach digital media with a critical awareness. I appreciated the podcast's breakdown (and rap) of practical steps to critically analyze a digital source and determine whether it is facts or fake news. it is increasingly apparent that students need to be taught not only how to navigate digital life with responsibility, but also with self-protection. Critically analyzing digital content with concrete steps is a way to do that. I might take out the swear words, though.
This week's content has me wondering what happens after we teach students to approach digital content with self-protection and self-responsibility. I think the snag in all of this comes in when students have developed these skills, but then they are confronted with an authority and/or loved one who has not learned how to critically analyze digital content. I can only imagine how difficult it could be to stand up for facts when a young student's mother or father or trusted caregiver determinedly reads only headlines and responds emotionally to digital news. I predict the next step will be how to teach students to defend critical analysis of digital content. That's the only way we can get students to a point where they not only critical analyze digital content and defend critical analysis of digital content, but they also use their critique skills to defend groups who are marginalized by digital content that is fake news.
Looking at my own information diet, I consume the following: cnn.com daily, postandcourier.com weekly, Longform podcast weekly, High/Low podcast weekly, and CYG podcast weekly. All of these digital sources are "newsy" with a liberal bend. I think a school librarian's information diet needs to be broad and at the same time, deep. There is a wealth of information out there for us school librarians if we are willing to take the time to take the information apart and analyze the information's insides for its worth.
Heidi you have a very good point about children dealing with authority figures not having the same critical eye towards media and the news. So many students have opinions that they develop just because their parents' have those opinions. Without good role models for critically evaluating information, students will never learn how to properly assess what they hear but they'll also never know that they should.
ReplyDeleteHeidi, considering our responsibility to students as one of preparing them for self-protection is a great way to shape our role as a librarian. If we provide an appropriate environment for exploration as well as the development of skills, when students are faced with opposing views from multiple sources (which should happen, at the least and with any luck, at college), our students will indeed be ready to digest all they are exposed to.
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