Fake News

I am aiming to teach high school (grades 9-12) Mathematics and English.

I think that by high school the kids should know at least something about digital literacy, but we all know that ‘should’ doesn’t mean ‘will’.

I don’t know how digital literacy could come up naturally in a maths class, but I suppose I could make a day out of it since it is important.

In English classes I think digital literacy is prevalent, especially for writing research essays. It would be easy to bring the topic up and write a class about digital literacy (specifically responsible resource citing) and add in the important parts of how to stay safe on the internet as part of needing to use the internet to research their topic.

I don’t know what the curriculum looks like other than remembering some of the projects I did in high school, and these answers fit this rough estimate. This will also go off of an English class research essay assignment.

To fit the NCTE Framework, the lesson must help develop skills to:

• Participate effectively and critically in a networked world;

Writing an essay having researched a topic (when using credible sources) produces a succinct version of those sources on that topic.

• Explore and engage critically, thoughtfully, and across a wide variety of inclusive texts and tools/modalities;

Researching the essay forces a student to look at multiple sources and question their credibility in order to create an accurate display of the topic. The usage of books and websites for citations allows for ‘variety of tools’.

• Consume, curate, and create actively across contexts;

Reading the research, creating a paper putting this research into context of their topic, and creating a finished work from multiple credible sources.

• Advocate for equitable access to and accessibility of texts, tools, and information;

In order for the research to be credible, they will have to ‘double-check’ their facts across multiple websites/texts, making sure the different media cites different resources (ie. making sure the resources don’t all just get this information from one cite //ie. thinking critically about what sources are credible//). If credible resources were widely available and peer-reviewed, the students would not need to check multiple cites’ sources.

• Build and sustain intentional global and cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so as to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought;

The students could choose a topic based on another country and speak with ambassadors of said country as part of their research. Then they would have to cross-reference and incorporate this information into their research paper.

• Promote culturally sustaining communication and recognize the bias and privilege present in the interactions;

If their topic is based in another culture, they would need to consistently check biases; both their own and their resource authors’ to make sure that their unconscious biases were not influencing their research. They may do this by searching for information that challenges their biases, or their research’s biases.

• Examine the rights, responsibilities, and ethical implications of the use and creation of information;

We have the right to free speech, as humans, but we have a responsibility to be spreading credible information, based in fact. It is important to understand that fake news gets clicks because that is what it is designed to do. Fake news is designed to catch your eye and profit off your shock. It is not ethical to profit off others’ gullibility. It is easy to believe fake news if we dig no deeper than the title, but if we think critically and check sources, we can catch liars. In creating the research essay, the students may point out some traps (of fake news) that they might have fallen into if they had taken them at face-value. The students could arrange their topic so that it directly targets a specific, popular ‘misinterpretation’ of data. Whether that be a tricky to read graph of statistics, or just some lie that caught on and spread quickly enough that it is taken as true.

• Determine how and to what extent texts and tools amplify one’s own and others’ narratives as well as counter unproductive narratives;

Part of the ‘checking biases’ includes checking if you’ve been only researching stuff that confirms what you already believe. Confirmation bias. Countering unproductive narratives is part of the ‘combating fake news’.

• Recognize and honor the multilingual literacy identities and culture experiences individuals bring to learning environments, and provide opportunities to promote, amplify, and encourage these differing variations of language (e.g., dialect, jargon, register).

Students in my class will most likely be from diverse cultures, and thus their work would contribute to multilingual presence and experiences in the classroom. Students could research topics based in other cultures and use their project to amplify other cultures’ voices/languages.