The challenges of the diverse media landscape when learning about current events in the social studies classroom
Rachel Tallon
Abstract
The changing media landscape of the Internet has created a diverse environment for learning about global and national current events. Keeping up with the news is difficult and can result in students feeling overwhelmed by having to absorb so much information from so many sources. The argument is presented that a critical literacy approach to news media promotes a deeper level of learning about current events by teaching students to view news media as a cultural text. Problematic aspects of our current news media landscape, and learning about events through a resource such as a weekly quiz, are presented to support this argument. The call is made for social-studies educators to maintain a critical disposition towards the nature, placement, and power both of news media and of classroom-education resources about news.
“How is it we have so much information, but know so little?”—Noam Chomsky
In 1998, Christina Ward and Mike Tapp (Ward & Tapp, 1998) argued that current events needed to be a regular component in New Zealand social studies’ schemes, but they asked questions concerning the media literacy of students when it came to the news. Ward and Tapp wondered if students at the end of the 20th century understood how news is packaged for their consumption and if students were aware of how the global nature of news selection may even affect their perceptions of themselves. The importance of asking questions about media consumption is underlined by Stockard (2007, p. 142): “The media are all powerful. They shape our ideas about every person, place and thing with whom or with which we are not personally acquainted”. Stockard implies that news media comprises corporate news companies, but today this collective “they” is under threat. Citizenship journalism and new ways of producing and accessing information are all changing the news environment, or “mediascape”.
This article is the outcome of personal observations regarding how young people may be encountering the mediascape in this hyperdigital age. This reflection leads to an argument that a critical literacy approach to the diverse and rapidly changing mediascape is as important as understanding distinct news items. I acknowledge that media studies classrooms may develop critical thinking about media, so the attention is on the placing of current events within the social studies classroom of Years 7 to 10 in particular. The focus is on how young people are interacting with—and being taught about—the news more than a decade after Ward and Tapp’s observation.
Media commentators who consider how we teach media texts have argued for some time that critical engagement recognises that all texts are discourses that not only speak to us, but can be challenged and changed. Janks (2012, p. 159) maintains that “critical engagement with the ways in which we produce and consume meaning, whose meanings count and whose are dismissed ... continue to suggest the importance of an education in critical literacy, and indeed critique”. The issues of media production and consumption are likely to be well known by specialised teachers of media studies, but engagement with media and the news is not confined to media studies. This article focuses on one media genre—the news, or current events—and its location in social studies classrooms. A common teaching resource, the weekly current events quiz, is given as an example of how news enters the classroom formally. Various issues are discussed concerning the use of a resource such as a quiz, to learn about not just the news, but encountering news media in general. Here, I observe that a familiar teaching resource may be struggling to maintain relevance during a very fluid time in news media. Teachers need to use such a resource carefully and strategically, if they use it at all. This argument is grounded in theory and literature relating to literacy.
Current events quizzes
Teaching resources such as quizzes are often used to get students interested in current events and switch on to what is happening in the world around them. They can seem like a good summation of what has been happening in the world. The impetus for thinking around how young people learn about current events arose when my daughter Sarah, (a Year 8 student, aged 12) returned one day from school frustrated with a score of only 3/10 in a weekly current events quiz in her social studies class. She reported that she and her classmates were finding it hard to keep up with the news, and learning about events that had recently occurred seemed to be impossible. To her, the world seemed to be spinning by in a whirl of disconnected events, most of which were tragic. Sarah expressed sympathy for her teacher because there was often little time to cover events in detail. Her friends additionally commented that the idea of the quiz was fun, but it was just very difficult to score well and this was dispiriting. It was also hard to know where to read, what to watch and, in general, how to keep informed.
As a former social studies teacher I empathised with Sarah’s teacher and saw the cause of the problem to be that Sarah was not reading the newspaper regularly, nor was she watching the news on TV. So the first step was to solve this problem. I discovered, however, that my viewpoint was outdated. This was illustrated by the first issue that arose: what online paper or website she should be reading and which TV news programme should she watch? Suggestions including Al-Jazeera, The BBC News or The New Zealand Herald were debated around the dinner table. One particular news website seemed to be the catch-all for weekly news. It had a distinct New Zealand perspective and was certainly not the BBC. A student from another school informed Sarah of the exact days of the week to read this website so as to score well in the quiz. Furthermore, it was suggested she should have a RSS newsfeed that could collate information for her and post it online to her digital apparatus of choice. The message was clear: read this website to score well.
Sarah’s stress was not an isolated incident. As a relieving teacher I have had Year 7 students asking me to identify a picture or world event so as to complete the quiz minutes before their social studies lesson. I have noted, though, that they have no interest either in the image or its context. This focus is understandable, because such quizzes relate to surface knowledge, not deeper understanding. It is hoped and also encouraged by many quiz writers that the background story to events is given in the classroom. To reflect on these young students’ engagement with the news is to consider the mediascape that they are exposed to and how this exposure affects their absorption of current events. The Internet has created a variety of media platforms through which global, national, and local current events feature. How are educators coping with the fluidity of this changing mediascape? Consumers of media are no longer limited to their regional or national newspaper or TV channel and are no longer constrained by a single editor’s selection. Today’s news audiences are likely to read an opinion about an event before they hear of the event itself through a formal news outlet. New types of news audiences are being formed and commentators are struggling to record these shifts in news consumption and their effects on society (Campbell, 2004; Fisch, Mcleod, & Brenman, 2009; Harrison, 2006; McGregor, 2007; Philo, 2002).
A theoretical lens: Critical literacy
A critical literacy theoretical approach that is based around the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire is useful for unpacking how young people are encountering the news today. Critical theorists are informed by a social constructionist epistemology which holds that people create their own knowledge systems as they interact with the world. Critical literacy moves beyond a critique of texts to questions about power and relationships among different social groups affected by texts. An important element of critical theorists within education is that they see education as a political act; it is not a neutral exercise. As an example of this political approach concerning news media, Torres and Mercado (2006, p. 273) claim that “In the pursuit of a democratic education, understanding of mass communication is basic for understanding how power and politics work in our society”. By understanding news media as a commercial and political product, it can be scrutinised for its power on forming societal relationships.
Linking Freire’s idea of education as becoming conscious of the societal forces that may affect people, Peter McLaren explains critical literacy as:
Involv[ing] decoding the ideological dimensions of texts, institutions, social practices, and cultural forms such as television and film, in order to reveal their selective interests. The purpose behind acquiring this type of literacy is to create a citizenry critical enough to both analyse and challenge the oppressive characteristics of the larger society so that a more just, equitable, and democratic society can be created. (McLaren, 1988, p. 214, as cited in Sandretto and Klenner, 2011, p. 19)
McLaren’s concerns about creating a critical citizenry remain relevant, although textual forms such as tweets, Facebook “likes” and blog sites are part of the news landscape today and expand the examples of media that might be considered in the development of critical literacy. The approach of critical literacy goes beyond merely reading and decoding texts, to supporting awareness about the constructions of power in society that may lead to certain media platforms having more influence than others. Being aware of the different forms of media is part of this critical analysis. Luke (2000, p. 453) has noted that the agenda for many theories that employ a critical stance towards text is:
not about the imposition of a particular ideology, [...] rather it is to teach students to read backwards from texts to the contexts of their social constructions (i.e. economies of text production), and to write forwards from text to their social use, interpretation and analysis (i.e. economies of text use).
Critical literacy widens the scope and shifts the focus of study onto the cultural uptake of texts and asks questions around how texts form people and societies. Texts such as news items do not merely inform, they also create ways of thinking, ways of perceiving others. It is important to move beyond the analysis of the news item and its uptake and to study how it is formed and disseminated. Has a news item been tweeted by a friend? Was it in a TV news bulletin or did you link to it from Facebook? A national or regional newspaper no longer holds the dominant position or common ground in the mediascape; it actively competes with global newspapers and citizen journalism for readership. This media power shift, combined with new digital technologies, means that young people face a much more complex news mediascape than previous generations. It is possible that there is no common ground for them; no central place from which to receive the news. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for teaching and learning in social studies and other curriculum contexts.
Sandretto and Klenner (2011, p. 10) point out that in The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) reference is made to critical thinking skills, but critical literacy is less significant. They argue that critical literacy for classroom practice moves beyond a simple decoding of text to reach a point whereby students can understand that the texts they are reading are artefacts which can shape their way of thinking about the world (p. 37). Sandretto and Klenner’s work has resulted in a useful poster (reprinted here as Figure 1) that directs the textual inquirer to examine assumptions and underlying ideas of a text and how these may impact their readers.
Figure 1: Critical literacy poster (from Sandretto and Klenner, 2011, p. 37)
Reprinted with permission from NZCER Press.
This diagram can be applied not just to texts but to their platforms on which they emerge. A tweet is evaluated in the same manner as a radio broadcast. Students are able to recognise that the different formats, such as tweeting and print newspaper, both compete with and complement each other. All the formats are constructed by people and can be examined both in relation to the messages they convey and to their effect on each other.
In returning to Sarah’s personal experience, her primary news platform was meant to be a particular news website so that she could do well in the current events quiz. Taking a critical literacy framework, this situation is reconsidered. Moving beyond analysing news items as texts would require a structural and conceptual shift to understand that it is how news items are collated and chosen and how they reach the young person that is significant. This shift requires different questions to be asked by social studies teachers, not about what students might be learning about events, but about what they are learning about this steady flow of information called the news.
The changing mediascape presents challenges and opportunities for the exploration of current events and development of critical literacy. I continue the discussion by looking first at the speed of media and how this velocity may affect the ability to absorb news items. Secondly, I raise the issue of the diversity of the mediascape and how a weekly quiz format may cause a constraint on choice. In sum, I am unsure if a current events quiz as the sole resource about the news is the best possible or a desirable resource to use to learn about current events and the news. Does a quiz encourage young people to seek out new sources of information and also to question those sources, or does it limit young people to certain platforms and restrict understanding of media? How might teachers use such a resource to expand knowledge about the nature of news as a cultural item?
The speed of the news: Keeping up as the goal
British critic Malcolm Muggeridge created the term “Newszak” to describe the relentless drone of omnipresent news media (Rosenberg and Feldman, 2008, p. 25). This relentlessness is not by accident and nor is it apolitical. By presenting so much information, it is harder to control, to analyse and to understand as a powerful cultural construction. Luke (2000, p. 71) writes that “unless educators take a lead in developing appropriate pedagogies for these new electronic media and forms of communication, corporate experts will be the ones to determine how people learn, what they learn, and what constitutes literacy” (as cited in Kellner and Share, 2005, p. 381). It could be added that, with the growth of citizen journalism, persuasive individuals have arguably as much influence as corporate experts. The cost of running a website is minimal, the reach is extensive, and a range of interests can be easily and rapidly presented through digital media.
The speed at which new information arrives has been reduced exponentially with every new technological change in communications. Print media can no longer keep up with the digital space, and even journalists struggle with shrinking deadlines. Consumers of news media hardly have time to digest one item before the next is presented. A natural defensive action against the onslaught of the daily/hourly news may be to switch off completely. People may find that they cannot physically cope with all this information, it is just too difficult. Witness the words of this frustrated blogger:
But finally, I’d like to argue that following the news isn’t just a waste of time, it’s actively unhealthy. Edward Tufte notes that when he used to read the New York Times in the morning, it scrambled his brain with so many different topics that he couldn’t get any real intellectual work done the rest of the day. (Swartz, 2006)
This blogger has concluded that trying to follow the news is unproductive for his intellectual development. Media commentators are concerned about the rushed effect of this new media infotainment age on the next generation (Miller, 2008; Torres & Mercado, 2006). Serious global events are reduced to sound bites for easy consumption and sit alongside sports results and celebrity gossip. There is a proliferation of digital gadgets which seek to provide diversions, including news, at the expense of thoughtful inquiry and deeper thinking. Current events are the mainstay of this rapid media production and consumers are bombarded with information from a variety of sources. Young people are also consumers of this information.
With this landscape in mind, I query how the speed of news media and the platforms on which it is spread affects young people’s engagement with the news inside and outside the classroom. Driven by our late-capitalist society that demands our attention on every screen, we might be losing the battle to reflect and to think not just about information but how and why we received it. We may know a lot about catalogues of events that are streamed through media sources. However, in our social studies classrooms there is a risk that debate, deliberation, and discussion may be swept through in a few minutes or reduced to bullet points on a PowerPoint presentation. Knowledge gained through such a method may be satisfying for students, but as there may be little or no time to digest and explore the information gained it may also be frustrating—as was the case with Sarah and her peers. Consolini Quinn (2009) argues that, instead of channelling students into one platform to control their exposure, we should welcome the complexity and diversity of the current media landscape and explore it with our students.
Hess (2009) has argued that good discussions about issues in the news rarely occur on the spur of the moment, but instead are carefully planned and time is allowed for these. Such discussions draw out the content and perspectives presented, and also evaluate and explore the nature, source, and consequences for the reader, of any news item. From my observations as a social studies teacher and parent, and informed by research literature, I argue that the crowded, varied, and fast-paced media landscape potentially disempowers and disengages at the same time as it purports to empower and engage the consumer. “Know more, Now” through a tweet may not mean that the reader fully engages with a news item. Such soundbites of news can become Muggeridge’s “Newszak”. The side effect of today’s speed of information and diversity of media platforms is that the aim becomes keeping up, and educators should question this emphasis. It is important, but is keeping up the sole aim of learning about current events and the news in general?
The diversity of the mediascape: Whose news is it?
The second question concerns the selection and reception of news media. With print newspapers declining in sales1 and more people accessing multiple sites online, this is problematic for any newspaper, publishing company, or social-studies teacher putting some questions together about recent events. It cannot be assumed that students access the same news as a quiz collator or teacher. This diversity of media access points opens up an interesting dilemma. Who can say that The Otago Daily Times or The New Zealand Herald provides better coverage of global events than Singapore’s New Straits Time. or the New York Times or which sources students should be reading? The ease of access to virtually any newspaper via the web does not necessarily mean young people are regularly reading the local news.2
In some New Zealand homes, Al-Jazeera and South American television channels are showing the global news. There is no print version of a New Zealand national paper, and TVNZ and TV3 are simply never watched. Research by Spoonley and Bedford (2012, p. 261) found that among new immigrants to Auckland, major information and entertainment sources were often supplied by co-ethnics or from the homeland. Contact with local media by immigrants was in some cases, as low as 15 percent, causing concern that this could impede civic engagement with the host society. Conversely, having such a spread of media sources arguably deepens the global knowledge of the population. For New Zealand’s increasingly culturally diverse population with access to a great variety of news sources, reported global events vary both in editorial perspective and in space allocated to them, creating a population exposed to a greater diversity of opinions.
For engaging with and learning about current events, knowing abou. global events (what occurred and where) should not be the primary goal. This is because the recording and reporting of any event is selective. It has been judged by someone as significant to know in a certain format and usually presented with a certain perspective. News is a commercial product and is biased, to the extent that in some cases it is propaganda; it is never apolitical and it is open for critique (see Matheson, 2011, for a critique of the imbalance of global news in New Zealand). Media commentators have argued that, to some extent, consumers of news media are controlled by media. They are allowed to see and respond to certain events in certain ways. Chouliaraki (2006, p. 66) argues that media spectators are both enabled and constrained by the technology of power that comprises today’s mediascape. You are only able to act on the information you are given. Given this powerful control of information, it is the role of education to encourage students to explore the discourse and power of media along with its various platforms.
A weekly round-up of global and national events may limit the news sources to that of certain compilers. This construction for consumers subtly limits choice. A quiz which draws heavily on the coverage provided by a national newspaper is arguably a marketing tool for that newspaper. If a student has not read what his or her teacher or the quiz designer has read, then he or she may be disadvantaged relative to those students who read the “right” media sources. This was what had occurred to Sarah. In reality, today’s young people in New Zealand may surf the internet, travel widely and converse regularly with people in distant places. They may be far more alert to a greater variety of global news and yet this cosmopolitan outlook may work against them in the classroom. In a sense, a resource such as the current events quiz which directed Sarah to specific websites so that she could achieve well inadvertently limite. her reach of global events and did not expand them. In a political sense she was forced to become a consumer of the choices of certain news editors. These editors were not up for her choosing, nor were they up for scrutiny. Failing to follow what they thought was significant caused her to be in the wrong.
A further anecdotal observation is relevant here. A friend’s very able daughter in Year 9 travels frequently and extensively across the globe. On asking her opinion of the weekly current events quiz, she expressed frustration that she scores lowly because she has not read what the quiz compiler has read. Her cultural capital was sufficient for her to challenge the validity of the quiz. She argued that, owing to her reading the Chicago Tribune and the China Daily, she had a better grasp of world affairs than the rest of her class and yet still failed the global sections of the quiz. On a positive note, she was philosophical about this, concluding our conversation by pointing out that it is impossible to know everything that was going on in the world, no matter how much one travelled or read. She was also confident that her teacher knew this and did not chastise her for her low scores on the weekly quiz.
The primary goal of learning about current events should not be about the events themselves, but to achieve an understanding that news is a product which is designed to inform us about other people and places. Students need to become critical and informed consumers of the various media products spread across many nodes that affect how they see the world. This includes being able to critique or understand the shortcomings of a news resource such as a news website or weekly quiz. Using the questions on Sandretto and Klenner’s critical literacy poster (Figure 1), and applying them to a world event, teachers could ask fewer questions about the event and more about what was not reported, what the editorial slant was, and what the reportage of the event means for us. Further to this, teachers might pose questions asking who else has reported this event and for whom this event is significant. Instead of directing students to a source about an event, the event serves to show how aspects of the mediascape report it. One event can then be analysed for how it appears across various platforms. “Why it was on the radio but no one posted anything on Facebook” may be the sort of question teachers can start to ask about how the news reaches consumers.
Part of reflecting on how we teach is to consider what Bishop and Glynn (1999, p. 78) call the socially constructed traditions of discourse. Examining news media as a socially constructed discourse includes “the full range of language and behaviours of meaning-making, of agreeing, of arguing, of thinking and conversing” (p. 78). Bishop and Glynn claim that if students master these processes, their cultur. is made visible to them and this is a vital ingredient of education. It is a way of empowering students to allow them to fully analyse what is presented to them. Many young people do not read the daily newspapers; however, their media environment is far more diverse than that presented in newspapers. By dissecting the methods of news production and dissemination, including a weekly quiz as someone’s summation of the news, students are able to distance themselves from the flow of information. They can then start to see news media as part of their culture, subject to certain constraints, and represented by a variety of imperfect sources.
Marginalisation of deeper learning
In reflecting on the issues raised by the speed and diversity of news media, my final observation is that, in studies of current events—and the use of current events quizzes in particular—deeper learning may be marginalised for the sake of surface knowledge. In other words, quantity is privileged over quality. Current events come from a variety of sources, rapidly evolve (this revolution, that disaster, a celebrity here, a celebrity there) and may become, to some young people, a form of media “churnalism”. When writing this article I observed a young person in a hospital waiting room watching the large screen in the reception area. The news was on and the sound was barely audible, so attention was focussed on the short headlines that ran across the bottom of the screen. Known as “crawls”, the young person would watch these, then return to read the news on their smart phone. The disparate nature of the crawls involved news about the death of Egyptian protesters followed by the results of a paternity test for a Kardashian baby. Was this young person receiving the same news feed from their smart phone? This is where I argue that a critical literacy framework can provide a useful tool for young people. In this hyperdigital age, where information is thrown at young people, they need to be shown strategies for engagement with news media. Social studies, which is a subject that often includes studies of current events, is a curriculum context where the development of critical literacy might naturally occur and be intentionally fostered.
Wineburg (2005, p. 660) cautions against a form of literacy that ensures young people leave school able to “decode simple texts and read for literal meaning [and yet] they are at a total loss when trying to judge the quality of what they read”. The case for deeper learning is not about getting more information about a certain event—the facts such as when and where— but of developing greater skills and knowledge for the student to understand any material presented to them. This requires arming students with a metalanguage that enables them to approach all news media with confidence. Sandretto and Klenner (2011, p. 91) found that for students to unpack what they were studying, teachers needed to introduce and teach new words that would form the students’ metalanguage for a critical literacy approach. This deeper learning provides students with a conceptualisation that all news stories and sources can be analysed and challenged. A metalanguage might include asking what the dominant or intended meaning of a text is and what alternative readings other people have. Ideas about bias, stereotype, and agenda also need to be taught to students. Considering why a blog site might differ from a print magazine is an important step in understanding the variation in today’s mediascape.
In social studies, learning and teaching about current events and news media is still a significant component of the curriculum at various levels. The combination of a changing mediascape, the 60-second news cycle, and the immediacy of news feeds ensures that it is increasingly difficult to map and quantify what counts as news. Consumption of the news takes place across many platforms, and in this digital news environment new thinking and careful pedagogical strategies may be required to cope with the pace and amount of information that constitutes current events. Instead of considering a news item as just text, thinking about various avenues of news media in which the text appears is as much a potential site for learning as the text itself. The news as a cultural artefact is an important concept that young people need to grasp so that the news does not become just a case of “keeping up” with events.
Concluding comments
This discussion began with a student’s sense of being overwhelmed by the pace, volume, and disparate locations of news media. The information was coming too fast and from too many directions. The weekly quiz, despite its promise of being fun and summative of the news was proving discouraging and dispiriting. When bright and engaged young people score poorly on such a measure, the issue is not their lack of knowledge, it is a reflection that current events knowledge is hard to quantify in this digital era. This generation faces a remarkably diverse digital news environment and it is important that educators, including social studies teachers, ask questions concerning how young people might be learning about current events in the formal space of the classroom.
My reflections and argument go beyond questions about whether a resource such as a quiz is an adequate tool for teaching current events. They explore how teachers might consider the entire news environment as something that can be studied. The news texts and the content of a weekly quiz are of secondary interest. This article’s main concern is how students respond to the mediascape that is more diverse than ever before in history. They have access to so much more, but they may eventually know less if they are not given strategies to critically engage with media.
Rather than being in awe of (and overwhelmed by) the news, and thus a passive, literal, and possibly confused consumer, students can be given the necessary tools to view the news as a cultural artefact that is shaped by the current environment. By considering how and why a global event that is sent to them by a friend via Facebook is not even mentioned in their local print newspaper they are alerted to how the news is a product that is created and affected by people. Young people and teachers need to know that a resource such as the weekly quiz is a selective account of events of significance and does not, and cannot, like any other resource present a complete picture of the “news”.
Returning to Wineburg (2005, p. 658), “To ask where information comes from and why texts are written is to confront the written word as an empowered agent, not a passive consumer.” An important part of a democratic society is to ensure citizens are equipped with the skills to actively and critically engage with their culture. Teachers of current events need a coherent strategy that refocuses the aim away from information gathering and “knowledge banking” to a deeper level of engagement and learning. Without a purposeful strategy, they are merely conduits for someone else’s selection of information. This article has reflected on personal observations with young people in Years 7–10. My position is that, even at this young age, empowering students is not to ask them to learn more information, to try and frantically “keep up”, but to encourage them to think about what and how information is being presented to them, then they can be in charge of the news. In this way, they may choose to know less news, but they will conversely, know more about the news.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr Anita Brady, Dr Bronwyn Wood and Andrea Milligan of Victoria University of Wellington, and also the four teachers and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and critical feedback.
Notes
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The author
Rachel Tallon is a former social studies teacher and will graduate in May 2014 with a doctorate in Development Studies from Victoria University of Wellington. She is currently consulting for Lift Education and tutoring undergraduate geography at Victoria University.
Email: Rachel@sqrl.net
1According to Nielsen surveys, less than 45 percent of the adult population (<15 years of age) read a major daily newspaper (Nielsen Media, 2012).
2In the United States, studies show that up to one third of teenagers are inattentive to daily news (Consolini Quinn, 2009).