Technology & Innovation - Issue 11

A critical MISSION Your students are more interested in the news than any generation before them – but how are they supposed to know which narratives to trust, asks Nicky Cox ... I was recently speaking to a friend of mine who teaches science at a North Essex state secondary. She’s a seasoned educator, and not one who can easily be ‘played’ by her students. So when she told me that the previous week, she’d spent a good five minutes of a Y11 revision session trying to persuade an utterly convinced teen that ‘No, the Earth really isn’t flat’ – to no avail – I knew this wasn’t a case of opportunistic time-wasting. That young person in question, who was on track for 7 to 9s in all her GCSEs, had ‘done her research’, and no amount of ‘facts’ were going to change her mind. Dangerous information As founding editor-in-chief of the UK’s first and only weekly newspaper for children, youmight expect me to be a champion of giving young people the facts, and I am, of course. But 18 years after launching First News , I’mnow seriously starting to wonder whether that’s enough. Because I’ll be honest – the sheer volume of information, unchecked and unfiltered, with which our kids are now bombarded on a daily basis is terrifying to me. Children are introduced to smartphones at an increasingly young age, putting them before algorithms designed to serve up content that grabs user attention and encourages sharing. A process that also promotes misleading clickbait, conspiratorial rhetoric and harmful mis/ disinformation. The line between what’s fun and edgy, and what’s harmful and dangerous, is a blurred distinction that even adults can struggle to perceive. Mis/disinformation can range from satire and parody to dangerous conspiracy theories, producing outcomes that span the mildly irritating to extremely serious – even to the point of people dying. Blurred lines Back in 2018, the UK’s Commission on Fake News and Critical Literacy in Schools found that only 2% of children and young people possessed the critical literacy skills needed to judge whether a news story was real or false. 60% of teachers surveyed at the time believed that fake news was having harmful effects on children’s wellbeing in the form of increased anxiety, damaged self-esteem and skewed worldviews. Fromwhat our readers tell us – not to mention what we experience as media consumers ourselves – navigating this volatile landscape is only getting more challenging. When politicians are presenting TV shows and social media influencers are pushing policy agendas – how are today’s teens supposed to knowwhich news source to trust? Literacy is rightly championed, along with numeracy, as a priority for our education system; but what about critical literacy? I believe that equipping children with the knowledge and skills needed to separate trusted sources from dubious ones – identifying bias and agendas, and triangulating data to create as accurate a picture as possible – should be woven into any curriculum designed to do more than simply enable students to jump through assessment hoops. Whether you’re of the opinion that ‘critical literacy’ should be taught as a discrete subject or not, I’m sure fewwould argue that simply absorbing prescribed chunks of information in order to regurgitate them later, on demand, represents a truly meaningful and empowering learning experience. Healthy scepticism The good news, which will come as no surprise to teachers, is that the skills required for critical literacy “Ifa school really is‘Good’, shouldn’t its pupils leavewitha healthy level of scepticism towards things they’re being asked toaccept andbelieve?” 22 teachwire.net