Make it Real with News Content

As students age, being “good” gives way to more mature concerns (avoiding addiction, curating digital footprints). Their sense of community broadens from friends, classroom and family to school and society. Current Events study, even when many students lack the context to understand it, begins to build a sense of the world beyond school, where what people believe and do matters. Current events discussions in class and at home prepare students for Civics education, which begins in 8th grade in Massachusetts. Civics asks students to consider their power and responsibility as social actors.

Although the dark cloud of misinformation via cable news (more for older people) and social media (more or younger) is more prevalent and harmful now than it has ever been in our daily lives and impactful choices, the silver lining is that news events lead us to consider its impact every week, perhaps every day. There are abundant object lessons to draw from current existential crises (the coronavirus pandemic, the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and extreme weather tied to the climate crisis). A moment of searching will turn up graphic details about what happens when people fall for misinformation, and delving will reveal case studies about how bad actors use digital media against unwary citizens.

Misinformation’s role in recent and ongoing catastrophes can be tied to content in all disciplines. To model reliance on trustworthy sources, teachers should find trending topics and share (for talk, if not reading) articles from newspapers of record like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Point out news articles that describe how social media and propaganda are making the world worse . Middle schools will have a hard time making sense of adult-reading-level publications, so these articles will need to be summarized, unless they have been covered by leveled digest students can read, like Newsela.

Here are four recommendations from Teaching Current Events in the Age of Social Media (Wolpert-Gawron, Edutopia, 2017):

1. Utilize resources that differentiate informational reading levels.

2. Create an archive of resources that focus on more positive stories (see Common Sense Media’s sources list).

3. Help students read critically to tease apart the true from the questionable and the false.

4. Teach students the necessity of unplugging sometimes. Be transparent about what intelligent adults do (or try to do) to keep life in perspective.