Students suggest solutions for declining media literacy and diminished trust in news

When high schoolers experience news and information through social media influencers and not through a habit of viewing or reading “traditional media,” how do they tackle a subject as complex as media literacy? 

That was the challenge that the Language Arts department at Northglenn High School, in the northern suburbs of Denver, attempted to take on as a STEM project. Northglenn High encourages Problem-Based Learning, where students work in teams to come up with solutions to real-world problems. 

“Journalism and media literacy fit very well with our content, and … the media landscape is changing so fast,” said Kathy Evenson, a teacher at Northglenn who helped design a PBL project for ninth graders. “I do think there was a logical progression in thinking, ‘OK, the media landscape is changing. People don’t trust media. What can we do about that?’”

As a longtime journalist in the Denver metro area, I was invited to speak to the students about the challenges facing media today — most specifically, the issues that have led to a decline in trust. We posed this problem to students: Citizens need a way to identify credible local and global news sources, because the expansion of independent media alongside corporate consolidation has amplified bias and weakened public trust.

“We all see a need for our kids to become more media literate, and digging into that problem really gave us a chance to go beyond just reading for information into reading critically and engaging with informational content in ways that a lot of high schoolers don’t,” Evenson said.

From that starting point, the teachers offered some basic understanding of media — newsgathering, fact checking, ethics and the laws around journalism, especially the First Amendment. They then let the students dream as big as possible to come up with solutions for helping others identify trustworthy information. 

My favorite solution was the “News-trition Label.” Much like a nutrition label on food, it would show the ingredients for the article in question, whether it’s aggregation or unverified facts. It took a concept that’s familiar to many people and applied it to media literacy. 

“I think that if we put these problems in front of kids, they come up with some uniquely simple ideas,” Evenson said. “We’re giving our kids a chance to tackle some of these real-world problems and hopefully apply it to their lives, not just as a classroom project.”

While there may not be a STEM or PBL opportunity in every newsroom’s community, the foundation of a media literacy curriculum could be developed for students as young as middle schoolers. Evenson said newsrooms that want to work with schools should be patient — an email might get buried, or other curricula might get in the way — but the outcome would be worth the wait.

“They’re the consumers that newsrooms want,” she said. “You want to capture them young and make it something that they find value in now. Ask them how they’d solve the problem. It’ll help them learn that, in this information-saturated world, this isn’t just something that’s being done to them, it’s something they can participate in.”

At the end of the project, the students presented their solutions to community members, including news professionals and academics, who came away impressed.

“The Problem-Based Learning model gave them the time and structure to delve into [media literacy] with depth,” said Michelle Ancell, a senior instructor in the journalism department at Colorado State University. “With the growing complexity of our news ecosystem, this is an increasingly important task since social media has been pervasive for their entire lives.”

Linda Carpio Shapley is a longtime Colorado journalist who has worked at numerous news organizations, most recently as interim CEO/president of Colorado State University’s student media.