Habits of Inquiry and Skills of Expression Needed to be Critical Thinkers

Abstract

There is a consensus in the literature that the purpose of education,  specifically media literacy education is to provide people with the habits of inquiry and skills of expression they need to be critical thinkers, effective communicators, and active citizens in the world. For a long time already, we have been searching for the best ways to promote critical thought, bearing in mind, for example, the phenomenon of disinformation. Additionally, scholars and journalists have long hoped that media education could positively tackle this challenge and enhance social goals such as political and civic engagement, particularly among youngsters. The goal of this paper is to introduce the way the “Academy for Reading the World: Journalism, Communication and I” promotes an immersive media experience for young participants (14-21), whilst selecting critical thinking, self-regulation, and communication as key competencies, in an interdisciplinary approach to media literacy. We propose to show that knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values can be mobilized together, with a reflexive approach to the learning process, to deal with contemporary media challenging contexts that insist on hindering reality readings.

Keywords

Communication, Media Literacy, News Literacy, Youth, World Reading

Introduction

Today’s media hybridization and textual intricacy frame the complexity of contemporary journalistic discourses. The need to know how to decode the myriad of stimuli available and the inevitable work of interpretation in media and digital immersion are essential for understanding reality. Being competent to read, and understand the world today is a complex but critical requirement that triggers an urgency of mixed competencies articulation, which will be effective only if combined.

Our perception of the world never stops being influenced by media discourse, broadcasted ideas, and published thoughts in a constant social, political, or economic construction of reality. The importance of media work quality is unquestionable for an informed society, and good journalism will depend, not only, on the capacity to bring citizens closer to the world as it is, or as Arthur Miller would say to the Observer Newspaper, in 1961, “a good newspaper is a nation talking to itself,” but also on each citizen’s interpretive skills.

The Academy

The “Reading the World Academy: Journalism, Communication and I”, selected to be part of the Gulbenkian Knowledge Academies 2019 network, originated within the idea of creating an immersive experience that promotes a set of journalistic and communication activities among young students (14-21 years old), based on partnerships celebrated between academic institutions with degrees in journalism and communication, high schools, and media outlets. The themes focused on the Academy sessions deal with journalism and communication issues, journalistic language and writing, media representations of the world, and media narratives as agents of the construction of social perception. The Academy aims to develop skills to deal with these changing and complex problems by contributing to enriching communicational and journalistic literacy among the young participants. A multidisciplinary team of professors and researchers from the School of Communication and Media Studies of the Lisbon Polytechnic leads a national action network made up of partnerships with six university and polytechnic institutions, six secondary schools from their corresponding communities, the collaboration of mainstream and regional media outlets, cultural institutions, and City Councils.

The six academic institutions, namely the University of Beira Interior, the Portalegre Polytechnic Institute – Higher School of Education and Social Sciences, the Tomar Polytechnic Institute – Abrantes School of Technology, Setúbal Polytechnic Institute – Setúbal College of Education, Algarve University and the promoter of the project – the Lisbon Polytechnic Institute – School of Media Studies and Communication – all have communication and journalism degrees and will contribute to the national network of the project by providing human resources and facilities to implement the Academy of Reading working agenda. 

The Method

The Academy follows three approaches based on students’ availability within their school schedule. We follow an experimental approach with 8 to 10 educational and cultural sessions lasting 90 to 160 minutes each, distributed during one academic year. All the workload is organized in active, oriented actions and lectures monitored by professors at school and in community contexts with the collaboration of various media institutions. And lastly, there is a focus on skill development with experts and researchers in the field of communication and news information and journalism, together with the help of some of their peers as “changemakers”. The working agenda (from October to June) challenges students to participate and question a wide range of transmedia experiences, which activate critical thinking and communicational competencies.

“I ask questions to understand the other’s point of views.”
“Maria”, 17, Portalegre

The Academy actions take place both in the laboratory rooms of the academic institution and national and regional media partners’ newsrooms and studios.

Regarding the academic institution, there are many facilities available for the project, namely classrooms and training labs; multimedia equipment with access to news agency information; communication labs with individual workstations; computer labs equipped with cutting-edge technological hardware and software; virtual television studios, postproduction workstations, audio-visual equipment; radio workplaces with postproduction workstations; multimedia labs, audio-visual equipment centre for planned school-based tasks. The actions occurring in media and cultural partners’ locations explore the specificities of their professional facilities. Together with the educational project of all its partners, the Academy provides moments where participants are invited to read and analyse the news, question the language used in the informational texts, and encourage a critical and constructive posture, which suits the challenges of contemporary information and media culture. 

“The session with the headlines and the grammar correction was my favourite. It gave me a critical view that I did not have before. I started looking at the news in a different way as they can also be wrong sometimes. It made me pay more attention and look more carefully.”
“Rui”, 16, Lisbon

It is expected that the planned collaborative work occurs during the school term, both in academic contexts and social contexts, for example, with workshops and seminars in the newsrooms of different media outlets, such as the news agency LUSA, RTP TV or Público Newspaper), and cultural institutions such as the News Museum.

The immersive and participant approach has already put together 300 youngsters collaborating in the activities in the last two years. The experience started in October 2019, permanently trying to develop information reading practices capable of instilling a positive change in society. 

Being skilled in explaining and understanding the world and being conscious and active in society are urgent needs that lack innovative approaches (Couldry, 2017; Ponte, 2019). The proposed activities of the Academy of Reading explore and discuss the impact that information has on each youngster’s personal and social life and encourage participants to become aware of their biased opinions and communication experiences through practical tasks. 

“I am not open to ideas that defy some of my principles.”
“Pedro”, 17, Abrantes

The added value lies in its qualified immersive approach: diversified activities, organized and monitored by teachers from accredited institutions in the area, in partnership with recognized institutions and organizations, which invite young people from high schools and colleges, with interest in communication and journalism, to work as a team in the analysis and discussion, for example, of the different types of information and communication patterns, or the relevance of regional journalism and independent media outlets to the construction of a good media and information diet.

Evaluation and monitoring practices

The Academy is responsible for the evaluation system and monitoring procedures considered relevant and essential elements to the project’s objectives, since it is argued that only by assessing procedures is it possible to determine whether a program works, if it is necessary to change strategies or meets its purposes (Alexandre et al, 2017). The Academy team monitors and evaluates the project, starting with the constitution of two main clusters, an intervention group, and a comparison one. In the evaluation process, items such as the profile and number of participants involved in the action are patterned, the change in behaviour in the use of social networks acknowledged and the change in the connection with news information identified, for example. 

Intervention Group* 

Are you interested in news?

The submission of questionnaires at the beginning and at the end of the activity’s agenda is carried out in both clusters, whereas the intervention group answers a short and customised survey – a logbook after each agenda session. Whilst monitoring the intervention group, quantitative and qualitative analysis is carried out, checking items such as participants’ attendance, expectations for actions, relation with the media, news consumption habits, interest in news information, the usefulness of media content consumption, etc. Furthermore, the data made available by online quantitative analysis platforms provide key information for the media experiences created.

Collaborative Outcomes

The Academy actions included original media content created collaboratively and originally by participant students since the focus has always been on the broadest range of media use as the key to literacy development. 

“This augmented situation requires MIL to be seen as a transliteracy, i.e. to deal with evolving ways of reading (from books to wikis), of writing (from texts to multimedia productions) and of publishing and participating online (from navigation to networking.”
Divina Frau-Meigs, p. 59

In order to create some news stories, for example, students were challenged to work in teams and to make sense of a vast number of possibilities and available information, considering how to select and organize it in a way that highlighted the most important issues. The judgements involved included selecting ideas for those stories considered important (newsworthy), but also being able to manage different opinions from colleagues in deciding how to present the information. 

“Maria was surprised by the previous necessary workload. From the early timetables to broadcasts that are never interrupted. Or even the need to be 24/7 updated with the latest news. She admits she had an idea of what a journalist was but had no idea that it would be such an arduous job with such a pressure.” Maria, 18 years old.

In the first year of the Academy activities, students were invited to participate in a design competition for the Academy logo. The proposals were very creative, and the winning outcome showed clarity in communicating the objectives of the Academy.

Meanwhile, other students were responsible for collaborating on the choice of the name and integrated elements of a game of the Academy (name, box, cards, and dice).

The objective of the game is to challenge the communication, self-regulation and critical thought of the players and test their level of media and information literacy.

Conclusion and Discussion

Since competencies are not acquired automatically but need to be learned and developed through a constant exchange with the community around participants, the Academy offers an up-to-date engagement agenda with a mix of journalistic and media activities planned by communication experts, who support media literacy. The national network project action follows strict evaluation processes constantly monitored and customised according to major participants’ interests and needs in developing communication, critical thinking, and self-regulation competencies. The reader of the Academy thus learns to maintain an attitude relying on critical thinking as a basis for meaningful and effective participation in the community if they are to participate effectively in a culture of democracy. Knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values are together mobilized in the activities to empower students to deal with media and communication challenging frameworks that insist on hindering social and personal readings.

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