Students as Journalists: News in the Age of Convergence

• In Event: 35.062 - Connected Learning in Chicago Public Schools

Abstract

This presentation will highlight an example of a Convergence Academies unit implemented in grades 6 and 9. 91 students ( 59 middle school, 32 high school ) participated in the News in the Age of Convergence curriculum, a 10 week English Language Arts unit in which students created community journalism pieces using networked and digital tools. The lessons were designed by teachers using the Backwards Design framework (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), with support from professional journalists, Digital Media Integration specialists and an Advisory Board of journalism, youth media and media literacy scholars. Students used laptops and iPads to research and author original articles and presentations about topics such as crime and violence, sports, dating, young adult novels and cyberterrorism. Data includes analysis of news literacy surveys, unit plans, classroom observations, teacher and expert reflections, youth produced artifacts, focus groups with students and recordings of professional development sessions with teachers and digital media mentors.
For the 9th graders, local news reporting of a recent murder of a teenage girl that many students personally knew formed a critical backdrop for the journalism unit. Students developed skepticism towards the news as they questioned the trustworthiness of sources used by mainstream news outlets and inaccurate representations of the story that was close to their lives. Using Twitter and Wordpress, the freshmen publicly responded to the limited and overblown portrayals of teen violence in their community with counter-narratives and personal accounts. For the middle schoolers, the journalism unit provided new ways to engage with their peers and learn from each other. Students used Google Docs to author stories about topics that interested them, and to share them with their classmates. Peer interviews and feedback sessions shifted traditional classroom practice towards distributed and iterative production of knowledge. However, while both age groups developed new attitudes about the news and indicated the importance of being informed and informing others, they saw little connection between what they were learning in school to their out-of-school lives. This tension echoes other research documenting the challenges of building connections between in-school and out-of-school practices under the Connected Learning paradigm (Korobkova, 2014).
Finally, analysis of teacher data (unit plans, reflections, observations, PD) provides insight into teacher learning through an iterative and media-integrated curriculum design process. Teachers developed a vocabulary of journalism terms and constructs, acquired a deeper understanding of their students’ concerns and interests, and incorporated networked and digital tools into activities focusing on core and critical literacy practices. The case study of the News in the Age of Convergence unit provides a model for structuring and studying Connected Learning in school contexts (Ito et al, 2013).

Author

• Natalia Smirnov, Northwestern University