Beyond Fake News: Culturally Relevant Media Literacies for a Fractured Civic Landscape

• In Event: Education and the Political: The Possibilities of Civic Education in an (Un)Democratic World

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that media literacy and civic education must be realigned in two major ways in order to be relevant to students confronting existential threats that face democracy in the decades ahead. First, these disciplines should honor the multiple and expansive textual influences on young people’s developing civic identities beyond narrow conceptions of “news.” Second, they should foreground personal storytelling and dialogue across difference–rather than a simple drive for facts–in order to support explorations of the bedrock values of equity and justice key to any future civic progress.

Too often in educational systems, civic education privileges systems over students while media literacy centers texts over youth. Many civics courses are organized to direct students’ thinking about public life into existing channels of participation rather than exploring their ingenuity (Mirra & Garcia, 2017). Further, a guiding assumption of much media literacy curricula is that helping students come to consensus about what constitutes “objective” or “true” information about civic issues is the pathway to civic harmony (Breakstone et al, 2018).

We instead suggest the need for teachers to apply lessons of culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995) to the fields of civics and media literacy in the pursuit of a more compassionate and just public sphere. This application involves two shifts: first, thinking differently about civic literacies to re-center the identities and interests of students; and second, concentrating on values of connection and equity just as much as veracity in students’ relationship to media and each other.

Our paper elucidates this culturally responsive approach to media literacy education by sharing data from two projects that translated this approach into transformative classroom practice. The first was a Hip Hop Literature and Culture (HHLC) elective course that engaged high school students in dialogue regarding popular media and culture for the purpose of supporting students’ critical literacy and identity development. The second was a cross-site learning community called the Digital Democratic Dialogue (3D) Project that leveraged digital media tools to facilitate empathetic conversations among high school students and teachers from six demographically distinct communities across the U.S. The authors conducted yearlong qualitative case studies of both programs that included observation, discourse analysis, participant interviews, and artifact analysis.

Findings from analysis of both the HHLC and the 3D Project illustrate how students’ stories, lived experiences, and questions about the world foster innovative civic learning beyond the normative constraints of current civics/media literacy education. Engaging with popular culture and media texts through authentic dialogue grounded in their own cultures, identities, and literacy practices allowed students to explore the intersections of race, class, and citizenship as they related to their individual lives and collective social imaginings in ways that offer three lessons for educators. First, we suggest that teachers lean into productive difference. Second, we suggest that teachers adopt a commitment to expand the kinds of texts and literacy practices that they leverage to bolster civic learning. Finally, we invite teachers to challenge assumptions about where and when civic learning happens in their practice.

Authors

• Nicole Mirra, Rutgers University

• Lauren Leigh Kelly, Rutgers University Graduate School of Education

• Antero Garcia, Stanford University