Experiential Approach:
Students Discuss Videos & Life Connections

The “gory drivers education photo” strategy provides graphic evidence of real world impacts to change student behavior, and it may be that students need to be imprinted by such experiences to remember what they are taught in class and apply it in different contexts, when different influences exist. The decision to apply "System 2" thinking to possible misinformation is counter-habitual, like the decision not to text while driving, or not to drive too fast.

It could be challenging to give students impactful experiences of misinformation topics in a classroom. Simulations (like lessons from the News Literacy Project's Checkology or other media literacy games) are good, but for a real-world experience, students would need to be searching for real information about a topic they care about and be surprised by a source that shocks them in some way, perhaps because they are taken in by it.

On Martin Luther King Day, we used to invite high school students to search for information about King and help them uncover MartinLutherKing.org, a site created by the Klan in the 1990s. It ranked first-page in Google, so students often found it when unsuspecting teachers asked them to search the Web and write reports about King. It is shocking (with inappropriate language and content) but a rich study. It has been taken down now - and it was risky.

Two recent movies provide rich evidence of the harmful influence of misinformation, with examples of digital representations that helped create problems or made them worse. They reference news stories and current situations that should be familiar and relatable to young people now: climate change, vaccination misinformation, electoral propaganda.

Videos not only describe but also illustrate the effects of media illiteracy, which is useful for students who do not (yet) use social media themselves. Dramatizations, visualizations, and real-life video clips can help make the dangers of misinformation real, and even personal to students. A student discussion after a dramatization is more likely to spark personal accounts of related incidents than one that follows a dry account of a problem.