Teaching media literacy in early grades: lessons from the DUCC project

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Citizenship education and teaching digital competencies for a polarized time

Proposal

For the past 5 years, the Polarization Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University has been developing and implementing education and media literacy efforts that focus on building mainstream resilience to harmful online content, including propaganda, conspiracy theories, and disinformation. PERIL’s approach is to begin interventions as far “upstream” as possible to plant the seeds of prevention early. One recent program is Developing and Using Critical Comprehension (DUCC), which is designed for elementary school students.

Using illustrations of animals and simple graphics, the DUCC curriculum combines digital literacy and social and emotional learning to reduce susceptibility to harmful online content. DUCC’s curriculum includes multimedia educational materials, lesson plans, animated videos, online games, and interactive activities. Using animals as the main characters (a pig, a swan, an owl, and a fox), DUCC attempts to be “age-appropriate, non-partisan, and applicable to all regions.” It also teaches understanding of difference and cultural diversity as building blocks to digital literacy. The project is in its infancy and has been piloted in three schools with promising results: over 100% of students reported that they enjoyed the lessons and 95% reported that they learned something new from the videos. The implementation will continue throughout the fall of 2024 and an analysis of its impact will be presented at the 2025 CIES conference. Some of the questions that will be explored are: How can DUCC be scaled up? How does it align with early lessons on citizenship? How could the curriculum be used in low-resource communities with limited access to online games? And how could it be translated across contexts for a global reach?

The work of DUCC is timely given the larger social discourse around the harmful effects of social media on youth.In 2023 the US Surgeon General declared that “We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis, and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis – one that we must urgently address” (Health and Human Services 2023). A year later in 2024, UNESCO reported on the harmful impact of social media on girls’ well-being, learning, and career choices (UNESCO 20024). The DUCC team is attempting to plant the seeds of prevention as early as possible—before most children have smart phones and access to social media. DUCC has demonstrated that digital literacy and understanding of misinformation can be taught to young children. The curriculum is a proactive intervention rather than being reactive to the harms of social media on older children and youth. DUCC shows great promise as an early intervention and this proposed panel provides an excellent opportunity to share insights with educators globally and learn from the other panelists and audience members.

Author

• Elizabeth Anderson Worden, American University