Podcamp Ireland Talk: PaperRound as a tool to teach Critical Thought

This is a rough write up of the notes I made for my talk to Podcamp Ireland on the topic of Teaching Teenagers Critical Thought and Media Literacy. My description of what I wanted to say was so maladroit that it was a great surprise to me when I actually got people coming in to hear me speak. Many thanks to all of them. I urged them to write about what they heard on their blogs/Facebook/Bebo (delete as appropriate.). I hope if they do they’ll link back to here so I get to hear what they thought afterwards. And if you weren’t there, but the below catches your imagination leave a comment or write your own response as well.

As I expect of myself, I made a number of errors and omissions, mostly of fact, while speaking. I have attempted to correct these below.

The talk was structured, in homage to old-style journalism, into Who, What, How, When/Where and Why Not?

Who?

I gave a brief introduction to myself and my background and what prompted me to think about the subjects of Media Literacy and Critical Thinking.

I’ve a BA in English and Greek and Roman Civilisation from UCD.
I’ve worked in DCU library, as a Civil Servant for the Public Appointments Service and am now a solicitor.

I set up Tuppenceworth.ie in 2001, before the world of blogging software. Invited people to send me essays by email, which I then converted into webpages by hand. This lowered the technical barriers to entry to the world of internet publishing for lots of people.

The aim was to get a range of different, and hopefully new, voices publishing their thoughts, opinions and experiences.

In 2005 Fergal, Copernicus and I sat down and did the Paper Round.
Journalists responded on the wiki we’d set up. It was written about in the Irish Times.

It also gave us a toolkit for teaching people how and why they could question the version of the world they read about in the papers or saw on the television.

Why?

The phrase Media Literacy sounds yawnsome. A marginal thing to get worked up about.

And if you tell people you want to equip children to find meaning in their society’s media you’ll be rewarded with a variation on the theme of ‘Huh?’

But unless the public- children or adult- are able to extract the meaning from what they read, see (TV/YouTube), or hear (radio/podcasts) they are open to manipulation by the producers and sponsors of those media.

We’ve seen governments relying on their voter’s inability to assess the value of what is being reported over the last decade. We can expect that unless we’ve equipped ourselves and our children for a media saturated world that we can expect more disastrously wrong decisions to be permitted.

More immediately, Conor McHugh of St. Thomas’ Senior National school in Jobstown in Tallaght presented at the Media Forum Symposium his research showing that implementing a Media Literacy course in his school resulted in an unprecedented drop to zero in disruption levels by students in those classes.

Students want to express themselves. They want to be allowed to think and reflect on the world around them. What Mr. McHugh also found was that when you’ve prompted them to turn their brains on, they stay engaged as they move into other subjects.

So for both our students’ sake and the sake of our wider society Media Literacy and critical thought are vital skills to teach in our schools. They form a mental toolkit whose principles will remain valid and necessary  regardless of what novelty the future brings.

How?

I outlined my current suggestion for a Transition Year module, modelled on the very successful Moving Images film studies module from the IFI. This would involve devising sufficient class notes, critical essays and some training to enable teachers to confidently lead classroom discussions on the media of the day.

Each class would mostly be taken up with an examination of a particular media object- a newspaper page or a magazine or a radio show. The students’ responses would be collected up and uploaded onto a wiki.

The same wiki would be accessible to other teachers around the country whose classes would have discussed the same item.

In this way the students can then see how other students from different backgrounds, different schools, react to the same items. If a class is filled with students whose families normally take broadsheet newspapers, their response to a tabloid’s presentation of a story will be different from one where tabloid news is the norm. The result is a mirrorball of reflections, showing the items from many different angles but also showing the students a sideways view of themselves.

Why Not?

Teachers Need Help
Training to help them teach Media Literacy is currently non-existant. And teaching it, even if you wanted to, is not rewarded by the point system.

Solution: Transition Year Module takes the argument about distracting from the points race away. And good support materials will make it an attractive option as a TY module.

Because
Curriculum Gatekeepers are hostile
See my previous thoughts on Dr. Anne Looney’s response to the Media Forum Symposium’s call for Media Literacy Education. Short version: The Curriculum is full.

Because

Political establishment is indifferent/hostile
Any move to produce a generation of questioning, inquiring voters would be a radical act. And radical acts are never welcomed by either political incumbents or the people who dream of replacing them.

Ireland’s political class stresses training for current, transitory, job vacancies over genuine long-term education, discouraging problem solving and critical thought.

When/Where?
This was the most straightforward part of the talk. The above can happen whenever enough interested people want it to. Nobody has to give permission to draft TY Module papers. And once they’re available no TY Teacher needs to look for permission from the Department of Education for permission to use them.

And as to where it happens- I’m afraid the answer is on places like this. On our blogs, on Facebook, in Podcasts, on Twitter. Wherever we connect with our friends, that’s where we have the influence to suggest that this is a good idea. To try to alert the teachers we know who might be interested to indicate what they need.

So I left my little audience, amongst them one and two half self described teachers, a challenge to take up the baton and run with it. I really hope some of them will.