NLP Annual Report FY23 - Report - Page 5
STORIES OF IMPACT
Jan. 6 insurrection a
game-changer for news
literacy educators
Jan. 6 illustrated to me
how fragile democracy
is and how dangerous
misinformation can be.
“
Anne-Michele Boyle
The insurrection at the U.S.
Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was a
watershed moment not only
for the country but also for
news literacy educators.
High school teacher Anne-Michele
Boyle told NLP that until the uprising,
she’d spent only a few days teaching
media literacy to students in her
Global Citizenship course. But when
she and her students watched
events unfold live during remote
learning, she immediately reworked
her curriculum.
“I scrapped my entire lesson plan for
February and devoted that month to
media literacy,” recalled Boyle, who
teaches history at Whitney M. Young
Magnet High School in Chicago.
“Jan. 6 illustrated to me how fragile
democracy is and how dangerous
misinformation can be.”
Boyle then spent months developing
a full media literacy curriculum and
now devotes all of January — and
often part of February — teaching
this subject.
On Jan. 6 in Mason, Ohio, former
NLP news literacy ambassador
Jocelyn Burlew was teaching
seventh and eighth grade history
online. As soon as her students
logged in, they began asking
questions about what was
happening. “These questions paired
perfectly with our study of the
Constitution, particularly the powers
of the president as well as our rights
and responsibilities as we discussed
the Bill of Rights,” she said.
Anne-Michele Boyle
She, too, saw an opportunity to
provide her students with a news
literacy lesson in real time. “We
had to slow down and really start
to analyze what we were seeing
and hearing, and then take what we
knew about the Constitution, the
role of the media, as described in
the First Amendment, to really start
to grasp what was happening and
understand the difference between
types of information and how to vet
it,” said Burlew.
Jocelyn Burlew
Stories of Impact
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